Best Practices in Nuclear Medicine

Nowadays, CBRN risks represent a serious problem that is taken under consideration in many countries. The strict monitoring of the internal situation in our cities cannot definitely avoid undesired terroristic actions. There are, furthermore, some important aspects too often neglected. As far as radiological and nuclear risks are considered, threats related to dirty bombs and improvised attacks can exploit a large number of sparse supplying channels often not properly monitored. If the construction, and even worst the use, of an atomic of ordinary activity weapon is not probable, the realization of an improvised bomb using medium- and low-activity sources is a real problem in every industrialized country. This consideration comes from the production of a large quantity of nuclear waste usable for this purpose. Obviously, due to the large number of law trained or even involuntary “producers,” a real control of these materials would require a capillary network at various levels. In this work, we take into consideration the use in medicine of one among the most diffuse radionuclides (the 99Technetium). This material, due its special physical properties, is the most used in a large variety of diagnostics controls (roughly the 81% of the overall procedures). Obviously, this strong and diffuse activity implies a large diffusion of radioactive material as well as of radioactive wastes at several levels that can be simply stolen and reused for terroristic activities. 99Technetium issues turn out to be very important examples of ready-to-use material for dirty bombs. The final aim of this research is not only the considerations related to this specific material, rather to push a discussion about the current diffusion of medium- and low-activity material in developed countries, a diffusion that can represent a real threat to implement the terror strategy. We will pay a special attention at the formation of the operators managing these materials. Looking for the specific training of nurses of nuclear medicine departments, we have prepared 15 questions; those nurses must be able to answer to their patients.