X-rays Tech and my personal story

X-rays Tech and my personal story. 

When I was a child, back in the early 1950s, I was bought a new pair of shoes. The manufacturer had just introduced a wonderful new pedascope machine to check how well your shoes fitted your feet. Even today, I clearly remember the wonder at being able to wiggle my toes and see them move inside my shoes. The machine used X-rays at quite a high level to give real-time images on a simple screen. It was ten years before Dr Alice Stewart produced research which showed that there was no safe level of X-rays, and even then few listened. In fact she was almost outcast from the medical establishment, and it was about another twenty years before the real danger from medical X-rays was acknowledged. Now, in the late 1990s the U.K. National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) is trying to persuade hospitals to minimise patient X-ray exposure, and leading Medical Research Council researchers admit that there is no “completely safe” level of ionising radiation. The 1998 Royal College of Radiologists guidelines sets out the current rationale for restricting X-ray doses.

Asbestos has been strictly controlled since 1970, and the use of most dangerous types banned. Despite this, deaths from mesothelioma (an asbestos induced cancer of the pleura/lungs) are rising consistently and the U.K. death rate is not expected to peak until about 2020. The time between the first exposure and death is now accepted as often being between 20 and 50 years. Most environmental cancers in adults take longer than ten years from initiation to detection. The eating of BSE infected meat possibly causing CJD many years later is another example.