Cremating cancer patients who have undergone radiotherapy may inadvertently send radioactive particles into the air, scientists have warned. In the first ever known case, researchers in the US found radiation contamination in a crematorium in Arizona after a 69-year-old man had been cremated following treatment with an intravenous drug for pancreatic cancer. Cancer experts who treated the patient contacted the crematorium because the man had died just five days after treatment. Tests on the oven, vacuum filter and bone crusher showed they were all radioactive with the same compound used in the therapy, but a different kind was discovered in the urine of the cemetery operator, suggesting he had been exposed when cremating other human remains. Under regulations in Britain, crematoria are warned to be careful when burning mercury dental amalgam, and devices such as pacemakers, and heart pumps. They are also warned to remove radioactive seeds which are used in prostate cancer therapy, but there are no warnings about people who have undergoing general radiation therapy. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) lead author Dr Nathan Yu of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona said: “Safety regulations are well established for radiopharmaceutical administration in living patients. “However, radiopharmaceuticals present a unique and often overlooked postmortem safety challenge. Cremating an exposed patient volatilises the radiopharmaceutical, which can then be inhaled by workers, or released into the adjacent community, and result in greater exposure than from a living patient. “Future safety protocols for radiopharmaceuticals should include postmortem management, such as evaluating radioactivity in deceased patients prior to cremation and standardizing notification of crematoriums.” More than 90,000 cancer patients undergo radiotherapy each year Credit: Danny Lawson PA Nearly 340,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year in Britain and 27 per cent of those will have some kind of radiotherapy as their primary treatment. Three quarters of people now opt for cremation at death, which suggests that more than 90,000 cremations a year could be at risk of distributing radioactive particles. Most radiation therapies which inject beams from the outside of the body are not harmful to others, but if people have internal treatment they are often advised not to hold young children, or get close to pregnant women for around two months after treatment for fear of causing harm. Over time radiation exposure can cause cancer and other health problems such as infertility. Although researchers say that the amount of radiation is unlikely to have exceeded annual limits for public exposure set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they said more research was needed to evaluate the frequency and effect of long term exposure for people working in the industry.
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