Mexican family under medical watch for radiation
Print Edition
Mexican authorities have placed a family under medical watch after they came close to stolen radioactive material that was abandoned in a rural area, officials said yesterday.
Soldiers have set up a safety perimeter around the hazardous waste, which was found in a field north of Mexico City on Wednesday, two days after the truck transporting it was stolen.
The material, which contains cobalt-60 and is considered “extremely dangerous” by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, was removed from the cancer-treatment device containing it when it was discovered.
The material was found about one kilometer from the truck, which was stolen at a service station on Monday. The device had been removed from its steel-reinforced wooden box.
The National Commission for Nuclear Safety and Safeguards said a family found the open medical device and brought it inside their home. They were also near the radioactive source.
“We will have to keep this family under medical watch for the sole reason of being near a certain distance from the source,” CNSNS operations director Mardonio Jimenez told Milenio television, without specifying how many people were in the family.
But Jimenez sought to reassure residents in the 40,000-population town of Hueypoxtla, 70 kilometers north of the capital. “The source is far from the population,” he said. “They should remain calm. There is a security operation to keep them from getting near it.”
Jimenez said it would take up to three days to place the source in a safe container and take it to the radioactive waste storage facility where it was headed.
Authorities have warned that whoever removed the radioactive material by hand was probably contaminated and could soon die.
The incident was a reminder of the dangers posed by the huge amounts of nuclear materials in hospitals and industry around the world if they are not handled properly and with sufficient security.
In particular there are fears that extremists could steal the material and put it in a so-called “dirty bomb” — an explosive device spreading radioactivity over a wide area and sparking mass panic. But Mexican officials believe that in this case the thieves apparently just wanted the truck, without knowing about the cargo it carried.
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