Here are the 9 most common types of cancer
Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT)
Selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT) is a way of giving radiotherapy treatment for cancer in the liver. This can be cancer that started in the liver or cancer that has spread to the liver from somewhere else. What is selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT)? SIRT uses radiotherapy to control cancer in the liver that can't be removed with surgery. It is a type of internal radiotherapy. It is sometimes called radioembolisation or trans arterial radioembolisation (TARE). Your doctor puts tiny radioactive beads called microspheres into a blood vessel
. This takes blood into your liver. The beads get stuck in the small blood vessels in and around the cancer. Then the radiation destroys the cancer cells. The radiation only travels a few millimetres from where the beads are trapped. This means it should cause little damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. Who can have SIRT? SIRT is available on the NHS in England for bowel cancer that has spread to the liver (liver metastases). It is for people whose bowel cancer has only spread to the liver, which can't be removed with surgery, and chemotherapy is no longer working. SIRT is also a treatment option in England and Wales for cancer that started in the liver. It is for a type of primary liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). You might have this treatment if you have advanced HCC and: your liver is working normally you can't have surgery to remove your cancer you are unable to have other treatments such as trans arterial chemoembolization (TACE) If you live in other countries of the UK, your doctor might be able to submit a funding request to see if you can have SIRT on the NHS. You might be able to have it as part of a trial, if there is one available. Or you might be able to pay for it privately. Doctors continue to research SIRT. They are collecting information on how well it works for different types of cancers in the liver. Tests before SIRT Before you have SIRT, you have tests to check your liver and plan your treatment. CT scan A CT scan shows where the tumours are in your liver and their size. So your doctor can check that SIRT is a suitable treatment. You might not need another CT scan if you have recently had one for something else. Blood Tests You have blood tests to check: the number of different blood cells (a full blood count)how well your kidneys and liver are workingthere are no problems with your blood clotting A planning angiogram An angiogram looks at the blood supply to the liver, which varies from person to person. The doctor is an interventional radiologist, who blocks off tiny blood vessels that lead to other areas of the body like the stomach or lungs. This stops the SIRT beads from travelling to other areas of the body and damaging healthy tissue. The procedure usually takes 60 to 90 minutes but may take longer. First you might have some sedation to help you relax. Then you have an injection of local anaesthetic to numb the area at the top of your leg or your wrist. Your doctor makes a small cut and puts a catheter into a blood vessel called an artery. Your doctor guides the catheter into your liver using x-rays. They then inject a contrast dye to show up all the blood vessels. They can see the images on a screen. The dye might make you feel warm for a few seconds and you might feel as though you need to pass urine. Your doctor can see if there are blood vessels that lead to other areas of the body and can block them with tiny coils. This doesn't harm the areas that these small blood vessels go to. Lung shunting scan After the angiogram, your doctor injects a radioactive tracer into the catheter. The tracer is similar in size to the SIRT beads. You then have a scan that picks up the radioactive tracer. This is called a lung shunting scan or SPECT CT. This takes about an hour. It shows where the beads will go when you have the treatment. This helps your doctor to work out if it is safe to go ahead with the treatment. You need to lie flat for several hours after these tests if your doctor put the catheter into an artery in your groin. This helps the wound to heal. You can usually sit up straight away if they used an artery in your wrist. You usually go home the following morning. How you have SIRT You have SIRT about 1 or 2 weeks after the planning angiogram. First you have another angiogram as above. You have a sedative to help you relax and painkillers to keep you comfortable. When the catheter is in the right place, your doctor slowly injects the radioactive beads into your liver. The whole process takes about an hour. When your doctor removes the catheter they put a dressing over the small wound. You need to lie flat for around 6 hours if the catheter went into an artery in your groin. Most people need to stay in hospital overnight. Your nurse will give you painkillers and anti sickness medicines if you need them. You have a scan the day after treatment to check the position of the radioactive beads. Side effects of SIRT For most people the side effects of SIRT are mild. They include: a raised temperaturechillsfeeling sickdiarrhoeastomach achea feeling of pressure in your tummy (abdomen)These side effects usually only last a few days. Your nurse will give you medicines to help. Contact your doctor or the hospital if you develop a high temperature (above 38C) as you might have an infection. Tiredness Tiredness is a common side effect and can last up to 6 weeks. This is normally mild, so you can still do normal everyday activities. Severe tiredness is quite rare. Talk to your specialist nurse if you are worried. Irritation to the gut Rarely, a small number of the microspheres can travel to the digestive system (gut). This can cause: pain in your abdomen feeling or being sick bleedinga stomach ulcerinflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis)Your doctor will give you anti ulcer medicines for around 4 to 8 weeks after treatment. This prevents irritation to the stomach. Inflammation of the gallbladder This is called cholecystitis. Symptoms include: painfeverfeeling or being sickIt may get better without treatment, but in rare cases you may need surgery to remove the gallbladder. Lung damage If the radioactive beads go to the lungs they can cause inflammation. This is very rare. It may cause a cough and shortness of breath. Your doctor might give you steroids to help. Inflammation of the liver This can affect how well your liver works, and may happen weeks after the treatment. You will have regular blood tests and liver function tests to check this. Your liver function might get better by itself after a few weeks. Or you may need steroids or other medicines. Damage to the liver can be life threatening, but this is extremely rare. Radiation safety after SIRT treatment For the first 24 hours after treatment you should make sure you thoroughly wash your hands after going to the toilet. The range of radiation from the beads is very small. But as a precaution, you might be told to avoid close contact with young children and pregnant women for the first week after treatment. Your doctor might also advise you not to share a bed with your partner for the first night or two. The advice about this can vary slightly between hospitals. Be sure to follow the instructions from your own doctor or specialist nurse. Most of the radiation from the beads has gone within 2 weeks. The beads stay in the liver permanently but they are harmless. Ask your doctor or nurse if you have any questions about radiation safety. Follow up Your specialist will follow you up closely after treatment. How they do this varies slightly between hospitals. You will have regular blood tests to check how well your liver is working. You might have a CT scan around 2 or 3 months after treatment. Your doctor and specialist nurse will talk to you about how often you will have check ups and scans. Radioactive Materials In Flight Instruments
This post is addressed to the many visitors of this site who repair, restore or simply collect old instruments like altimeters, turn and slip indicator, compasses, etc. However, former pilots and current airliners crew and frequent flyers could find something interesting in this article. Here's the reason why.
A friend of mine, who's keen on aviation, recently bought on eBay an old ADI (Attitude Indicator). This friend has also a small Geiger counter that he uses to inspect all the items he receives from abroad because he was taught nuclear physics at school. His Geiger counter is able to detect alpha and bravo particles, and gamma rays. He neared the counter to the glass of the instrument and got no audible tone (the Geiger counter has a gas-filled tube that conducts electricity when a particle or photon of radiation makes the gas conductive. The tube amplifies this conduction and outputs a current pulse, which is heard as a "click"; if you hear a click every now and then, you should not worry but if clicks become frequent it means you are near a radioactive source).
My friend opened the instrument in order to clean it and when he used the counter again to detect radiation, to his surprise, he heard multiple frequent clicks, meaning that the portable device was next to "something" emitting either radioactive particles or rays. Since he previously hadn't detected anything (when the instrument was closed) he was sure that alpha particles were causing that large amout of "clicks", since alpha particles may be completely stopped by a sheet of paper (in his case, by the glass of the instruments), beta particles by aluminum shielding while gamma rays can't be stopped and can penetrate deeply unless stopped by a thick layer of lead. With the same procedure, but without removing any glass, the Geiger counter found gamma radiation being emitted by another instrumment. Following the discovery of radiactivity in normal flight instruments we started an extensive search on the Internet and found that most instruments made up until 1960s had the luminous paint, needed to read them at night, based on Radium. The Radium is one of the most radioactive chemical elements (symbol Ra and atomic number 88), 1000 times more radioactive than Uranium. Its most stable isotope, Ra-226, has a half-life of 1602 years and decays into radon gas. This means th
at a 70 years old instrument is still well active and will be for the next thousands years. The radiation can be sufficiently penetrating to break chemical bonds which are essential to the structure and function of living tissue possibly causing (depending on the intensity and duration of the exposure) serious health problems. The danger is actually less in radiation than in the ingestion of the contaminated dust that accumulates behind the instrument's glass as the intensity decreases with the square of the distance from the source. The risks associated with radiations is in fact divided into those from internal radiation, that results from radioactive particles becoming absorbed or into a person's body, and those from external radiations from people being next to the source of radiations. 
Dealing with the external radiations, if the amount of Radium used to create fluorescent dials is small, the radiation should not be so intense. Consequently if you keep the object far enough (some meters) from where you live, sleep and spend most of the day, you should not have serious problems in the long term because of that nice instrument you have on your bookcase. However, as said, that depends from the amount of radioactive material contained in the instrument and the distance between you and the source. Obviously, if you collect WWII compasses and altimeters, it is better to check the intensity of radiation and to keep them away from your bed! Various sources available on the Internet can provide much more details on the gamma radiation risk. You can find interesting websites where the dose of radiation absorbed by some of these instruments (especially compasses) was measured at different distances (on contact, at 30 cm, at 1 meter, etc.). 
For what concerns the internal radiation, if all the Radium in the instrument remains behind the glass (and this one is sealed and intact) alpha particles will not be able to penetrate the glass and Radium dust will have little chances of being inhaled or ingested. Instead, if you want to repair or restore the instrument, you must be aware that you are going to handle Radium powder that could spread in your room for you to breath or that you can have on your gloves and cloths and thus easy to be ingested. Just to understand how dangerous alpha particles could be for our body, read the following statement taken from Wikipedia: "Because of this high mass and strong absorption, if alpha emitting radionuclides do enter the body (if the radioactive material has been inhaled or ingested), alpha radiation is the most destructive form of ionizing radiation. It is the most strongly ionizing, and with large enough doses can cause any or all of the symptoms of radiation poisoning. It is estimated that chromosome damage from alpha particles is about 100 times greater than that caused by an equivalent amount of other radiation". If you want to open the instruments (for example, to restore them and put them in a cockpit) you should adhere to the following precautions: You can work safely around radiation and/or contamination by following a few simple precautions: 1. Use time, distance, shielding, and containment to reduce exposure. 2. Wear dosimeters. 3. Avoid contact with the contamination. 4. Wear protective clothing that, if contaminated, can be removed. 5. Wash with nonabrasive soap and water any part of the body that may have come in contact with the contamination. 6. Assume that all materials, equipment, and personnel that came in contact with the contamination are contaminated. Radiological monitoring is recommended before leaving the scene.
The Swiss Armed Forces issued an interesting document (in Italian language) explaining the risk associated with Radium and providing a list of the historical military equipment that could contain Radium: http://www.Labor-spiez.Ch/de/the/st/Radioattivita_materiale.Pdf Beware, Radium can still be found on many consumer product as explained in the following Health Physics Society document: http://www.Hps.Org/documents/consumerproducts.Pdf After explaining the risk of handling radioactive material, let's explain some other things that may help to you fully understand the actual entity of the problem. The absorbed radiation dose is measure in millirem, mrem. Consider that (taken from the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality website: http://www.Deq.State.Id.Us/inl_oversight/radiation/radiation_guide.Cfm): – Average Dose to US public from all sources 360 mrem/year – total dose limit: Public continuos exposure: 100 mrem, infrequent: 500 mrem Foods that are rich in potassium, like fruits, beans and lentils, vegetables, and some whole grains, expose us to radiation as potassium decays. The food we eat exposes us to about 40 millirem of radiation each year. If you live near a nuclear power plant, you'll receive about .009 millirem of radiation each year. An x-ray machine uses radiation to look inside your body. Your dose depends on what part of your body is x-rayed, how many are taken, and the condition of the x-ray machine. A dental x-ray can expose you to levels as low as 2 to 3 millirem or as high as 25-35 millirem. Smoking 1½ packs a day can result in exposure to 1,300 millirem of radiation per year. Tobacco has a high concentration of polonium-210, a naturally occurring radioactive element. Flying in an airplane reduces the thickness of atmosphere shielding you from cosmic sources of radiation, including our sun and cosmic rays. You receive about 1 millirem of radiation for each 1,000 miles you fly. A member of an airline crew receives about 200 millirem a year on the job. According to the Health Physics Society: "Pilots flying high-altitude, high-latitude routes do receive exposures that put them in the top five percent of all radiation workers when ranked by dose." Not only the flight instruments produced in the first half of the 20th Century have Radium dials. Many clocks had dials made visible at night with Radium. The dose of gamma radiation generated by these clocks (worn as up as 16 hours per day) is estimated on the whole body to be around 7 to 9 mrem/year. This is a value that should be comparable to the dose received by gamma radiation emitted by a turn and bank indicator (not in contact with the body). Thus the radiation caused by an instrument could be less than the dose of radiation absorbed by the food we eat. At the following address (if you live in the US) you can calculate your average annual exposure: http://www.Epa.Gov/rpdweb00/understand/calculate.Html. I'm not an expert of this matter but I'm sure you now have at least more details to understand the risk associated with handling an instrument containing Radium and choose what to do with it. Tokaimura Tragedies: How Hisashi Ouchi Became The Most Radioactive Man
Hisashi Ouchi (35) had his body draped over the tank at the time, which is why he received such a high dose of radiation. Masato Shinohara (39), a technician assisting Ouchi, received 10 sieverts. Supervisor Yutaka Yokokawa (54), sitting at a desk 13 feet (4 meters) away from them, received 3 sieverts.
Another 24 JCO workers received around 48 millisieverts (0.048 sieverts) of radiation.
Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) is a serious medical condition caused by exposure to a high dose of radiation in a short period. The severity and specific symptoms vary depending on the dose, exposure duration, and radiation type.
Generally, people exposed to radiation may experience skin reddening or radiation burns, headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, and fever about 2 hours after exposure. But radiation damages living tissues at a cellular level, and further developments include harm to the bone marrow, including depletion of white blood cells (leukopenia) and red blood cells (anemia).
Gastrointestinal symptoms, such as bleeding, dehydration, and electrolyte imbalances, may manifest due to damage to the cells lining the gastrointestinal tract. If the radiation damages the neural tissues, the central nervous system can also be affected, resulting in confusion, seizures, and loss of consciousness.
Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) doesn't have a cure, and treatment, at that time, was based on supportive care. There are now a few treatment options for internal decontamination, but untreatable ARS occurs at a dose of eight to 10 sieverts.
Having received a dose of 17 sieverts, Hisashi Ouchi fainted and then started vomiting a few moments after the accident. By the time he was taken to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, he was suffering from severe radiation burns, diarrhea, and dehydration. He had a white cell count close to zero, which meant he effectively no longer had an immune system.
He was transferred to a radiation ward at the University of Tokyo Hospital, where he received a blood stem cell transplantation, with his sister as a donor. He was also treated with blood transfusions, broad-spectrum antibiotics, painkillers, and granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (a glycoprotein that encourages the bone marrow to produce stem cells).
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