Answer to Question #546 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

Q

I'm interested in becoming an x-ray technologist and I would like to know about the specific hazards of being exposed to radiation. Is the career a safe one?

A

That's a great question. When I started college, I went for two years to become an x-ray technologist. It was only AFTER I got into the profession that I started asking more about radiation exposure and biological effects for me and for the patients. That's how I got into health physics (radiation safety). It appears that you've thought about the same questions but in advance!

A general answer to your question is, "Yes, the career is a safe one." You will, however, certainly be in a position to get higher exposures if regulations and standard precautions are not followed. When they are followed, you should receive less than one-tenth of the annual radiation exposure limit for radiation workers. That limit is 5,000 mrem per year (mrem is a unit of radiation dose). Even though that limit exists, institutions using radiation for diagnosis, therapy, or research have policies to keep exposures to their staff and patients as low as possible.

You might want to visit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Web site and look at a regulatory guide on occupational exposure—click on Regulatory Guide 8.29. Just to give you an idea, I work at a large medical center. We have over 41,000 employees and about 3,000 wear a dosimeter to determine how much radiation they receive. The Radiology Department here performs over 1.6 million x-ray procedures a year. The average annual exposure to one of our x-ray technologists is about 80 mrem, well below the limit of 5,000 mrem. The 80 mrem is an average—there are some who receive no exposure because they work in areas where they are never in the room during an exposure and there are some who might receive a couple hundred mrem per year because their work involves being in the room almost constantly when fluoroscopy procedures are taking place. This latter group keeps their exposure low by wearing lead aprons and keeping away from the patient as much as possible during the fluoroscopy procedure (during a fluoroscopy procedure, the patient is your source of exposure unless a portion of your body is in the direct beam).

On a broader scale, below is a reference that indicated for the period 1985-1989, the average annual effective dose to monitored workers in diagnostic radiology was about 500 mrem. This was a decrease of nearly 400 mrem—from 900 mrem in the period 1975-1989. Both of these are still below the annual limit and show a decreasing trend in the amount of occupational exposure received by an x-ray technologist even though the number of x-ray procedures are on the increase.

Reference
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Sources and effects of ionizing radiation. 1993 Report to the General Assembly with scientific annexes. United Nations, New York; 1993.

Kelly Classic
Certified Medical Health Physicist