Medical Radiation Accidents Article in NYTimes

The article is on how high energy radiation beams used to treat cancer are often not correctly targeted, resulting in radiation damage to healthy tissue and even death to patients.

Some interesting bits:
1) the obligatory 33-- "The Times found that on 133 occasions, devices used to shape or modulate radiation beams — contributing factors in the injuries to Mr. Jerome-Parks and Ms. Jn-Charles — were left out, wrongly positioned or otherwise misused."

2) one patient's cancer likely came from ground zero:

As this warning circulated, Mr. Jerome-Parks was dealing with what he thought was a nagging sinus infection. He would not know until two months later that cancer had been growing at the base of his tongue. It was a surprising diagnosis for a relatively young man who rarely drank and did not smoke.

In time, his doctors and family came to suspect that his cancer was linked to the neighborhood where he had once worked, on the southern tip of Manhattan, in the shadow of the World Trade Center.

Several years before, he had taken a job there as a computer and systems analyst at CIBC World Markets. His starting date: September 2001. (snip)

In the days and weeks that followed, Mr. Jerome-Parks donated blood, helped a family search for a missing relative and volunteered at the Red Cross, driving search-and-rescue workers back and forth from what became known as “the pile.” Whether toxic dust from the collapsed towers caused his cancer may never be known, though his doctor would later say he believed there was a link.

3) this description of radiation induced should ring a bell--

A friend from church, Paul Bibbo, stopped by the hospital after the second treatment to see how things were going.

Mr. Bibbo did not like what he saw. Walking into a darkened hospital room, he recalled blurting out: “ ‘My goodness, look at him.’ His head and his whole neck were swollen.”

Anne Leonard, another friend, saw it, too, on a later visit. “I was shocked because his head was just so blown up,” Ms. Leonard said. “He was in the bed, and he was writhing from side to side and moaning.”