Radiation

A second hospital in Los Angeles County has discovered that patients were receiving overdoses of radiation from CT scans used to diagnose strokes. Ten patients at Glendale Adventist Medical Center this year accidentally got three to four times the normal radiation dose, hospital officials said Friday. In August, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found that after being reprogrammed, a General Electric scanner began delivering eight times the normal dose to patients receiving the same procedure, known as a CT brain perfusion scan.

An expedition to monitor seas near an experimental Soviet atomic submarine, which sank off Norway nearly four years ago, has found no radiation leaks, Itar-Tass news agency said on Saturday.

Scientists mimicked one of cancer's sneaky tricks to create a drug that promises to prevent a serious side effect of cancer treatment -- radiation damage -- or offer an antidote during a nuclear emergency. A dose of the experimental drug protected mice and monkeys from what should have been lethal doses of radiation, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science. A study to see if the compound is safe in people could begin as early as this summer. The drug activates a protein that prevents cells from self-destructing, as they would normally do when damaged by radiation.

An experimental radiation treatment nearly stopped the progression of multiple sclerosis in some patients for up to four years, longer than any other therapy yet tried, a study says. While radiation is probably not the ultimate answer to multiple sclerosis, researcher Stuart Cook said, "right now, if I had chronic progressive MS, I would be very interested in taking part in a trial that was using this." Cook's study is described in the journal Neurology.

Radiation from the largest underground test in U.S. nuclear history has reached the surface of an Alaskan island, Greenpeace said, and Energy Department officials want to have a look at the environmental group's evidence. Department officials met in Washington with Greenpeace researchers and said they would analyze samples gathered last summer on the Aleutian island of Amchitka. At issue is a 1971 test that the Nixon administration said was needed for research on an antiballistic missile

Re "Weather Tower on Sulphur Mountain," Ventura County letters, Feb. 16. I feel compelled to rebut Bruce Garber's concerns about radiation from the tower. First, the antenna is mounted 90 feet above the terrain--well above the local population. To operate efficiently, the radiation is focused into a narrow beam of only a very few degrees vertically and horizontally, which should obviate spraying of the local populace with radiation. Second, the intensity of such radiation varies in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the site.

More than 200 patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center were inappropriately exposed to high doses of radiation from CT brain scans used to diagnose strokes, hospital officials told The Times on Friday. About 40% of the patients lost patches of hair as a result of the overdoses, a hospital spokesman said. Even so, the overdoses went undetected for 18 months as patients received eight times the dose normally delivered in the procedure, raising questions about why it took Cedars-Sinai so long to notice that something was wrong.

Intense radiation therapy for three weeks after surgery for early breast cancer keeps the disease at bay just as well as lower doses for five weeks, a study found. More than 1,200 women were treated with either the accelerated three-week dose of radiation or the standard five-week therapy, then tracked for recurrences for up to 12 years. The cancer returned to the same breast a decade after treatment in 6.2% of those treated for three weeks and 6.7% of those getting standard therapy, according to the study presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in Boston.

Radiation from the largest solar flare in four years is expected to reach the Earth Thursday and Friday, potentially interfering with communication and navigation satellites and disrupting ground-based communication networks and power grids. The rain of charged particles from the so-called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, should also enhance the northern lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, making them both more prominent and visible farther south, perhaps even into the northern tier of the United States, experts said.