- Death road to canada console command health skin#
- Death road to canada console command health professional#
Over the next few weeks Katie Yarborough's body began to look as if a slow motion gunshot had gone through her chest and out her back. "I got told that this kind of talk was libel unless I had proof and that I'd better stop." At the time there were five Therac-25s installed in hospitals in the U.S. "I got this intimidating phone call from AECL," he says. There were, Still says, unpleasant results.
Death road to canada console command health professional#
I make a lot of noise." He was already frustrated by what he saw as AECL's lack of interest in fixing problems he'd had with another of their medical machines and this time he let his colleagues and a professional organization, Pharmacopeia, know about the anomaly. The machine worked fine.īut Still, a forty-year-old Georgian with a broad southern drawl, describes himself as "a troublemaker. So the technician couldn't have done anything wrong. Whenever he changed any component of Yarborough's prescribed treatment on the computer console, the beam collapsed, shut off by the Therac-25's safety system. He shot beams into water and into the air of the treatment room. That night Still stayed late after work and tried to reproduce a beam that could have gone through a patient's body with such obvious force. Physicist Still later estimated that Yarborough probably received between 15,000 and 20,000 rads on that dime-sized space. One thousand rads can be fatal if it is spread over the entire body. The damage done by radiation depends upon its strength, what proportion of the body is exposed, and whether it strikes any vital organs. "That looks like the exit dose made by an electron beam," he said to Yarborough and her doctor. Still's stomach turned over when he saw it.
Death road to canada console command health skin#
There was also a larger pink circle of skin high on the left side of her back.
There was a red mark the size of a dime on her chest. She said she felt tingling inside her body and growing pain. Not possible, he was told three days later. But he did his duty, and telephoned AECL up in Ottawa to ask whether a Therac-25 could ever project the electron beam without spreading it properly as the machine was supposed to do. "I can't understand what might have done it," Still said to her. Yarborough's skin looked fine, although it felt slightly warm. Yarborough's oncologist and Tim Still, the medical physicist at Kennestone, both examined her. "You burned me," she told the technician, who replied that it wasn't possible. But this day, when the technician activated the machine, Yarborough said she immediately felt this red-hot sensation. It would last only a few seconds, during which Yarborough would feel nothing.
The usual treatment delivered a dose of around 200 rads: rads are the commonly accepted measurement of radioactive energy - a chest x-ray, for example, gives off a fraction of one rad. Yarborough took off her top and her bra and settled in the treatment room for an electron treatment beamed high on the left side of her chest.
Designed and developed by AECL Medical, a division of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Therac-25 could speed up electrons and turn them into a high-energy beam that destroyed surface tumours on the skin, or else convert the electrons into x-rays to penetrate tumours deeper in the body. The machine being used to treat Yarborough was a recent acquisition at Kennestone: a state-of-the-art linear accelerator called the Therac-25, which had already successfully performed 20,000 irradiations on the region's cancer patients. She needed a dose of radiation treatment in the adjacent lymph nodes to make sure there would be no recurrence. The sixty-one-year-old manicurist who worked at a local hair salon had had a lump successfully removed from her left breast a few months earlier. On a day early in June, 1985, Katie Yarborough drove to the Kennestone Regional Oncology Center in Marietta, Georgia, for her twelfth cancer treatment. Sabotaged a state-of-the-art medical wonder. Fatal Dose - Radiation Deaths linked to AECL Computer Errors FATAL DOSE
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