THUNDER BAY -- Hospital officials assure the public that delays in delivering isotopes to Thunder Bay are quite uncommon.
And they’ll soon be a thing of the past.
In December twice patients were forced to reschedule cancer treatments because Air Canada was unable to get the highly time sensitive isotopes to Thunder Bay from a facility in southern Ontario in time.
The radioactive material has a short half life and begins to decay the moment it leaves the production facility, said hospital spokeswoman Tracie Smith.
“Occasionally – I would say infrequently – there are delays, due to any number of reasons with airlines. It could be weather, it could be mechanical,” Smith said.
“There is immediate communication. If a flight is going to be delayed we try to get information on the anticipated landing time. If a flight is to be rescheduled we work with the airlines to see when the airline is coming in so we can work very closely with patients to minimize any impact and reschedule appointments as necessary.”
Isotopes are short-lived tracers that are used medically to target or destroy certain cells, usually, but not always, cancer related.
They’ve got about a 110 minute half-life, which means their effectiveness declines rapidly. Given the travel time between Toronto and Thunder Bay, it also means there is little room for delays. It also means they try to schedule all isotope-related treatments on a single day, usually five or six at a time, and run their positive emission tomography machine just once a week.
The good news is hospital officials expect a cyclotron in Thunder Bay to be up and running by the end of the year.
The device, currently going through the approval process, will create isotopes in the city, ending the need for reliance on the southern Ontario facility.
“This is one of the positive outcomes we’ve been anticipating for some time with our new cyclotron facility,” Smith said.
A licence to operate was obtained in July 2015 and since then the hospital has been working on procedures and protocols.
“We anticipate by fall of 2017 we’ll be producing our own medical isotopes here, completely eliminating any flight delays,” Smith said.
