White House Chronicle

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Nuclear Medicine: An Old Therapy Can Save COVID-19 Patients’ Lives

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Can a physical therapy which has been abandoned in favor of drugs be quickly revived to change the mortality statistics for COVID-19?

Nuclear scientists believe it can, according to Llewellyn King, a nationally syndicated columnist and executive producer and  host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS, SiriusXM Radio and other broadcast outlets.

King argues in a column for InsideSources that an extremely low dose of radiation — about one hundredth of the treatment given to cancer patients — might save the lives of nearly all COVID-19 patients, depending on when certain symptoms emerge.

More than 70 years ago, radiation was used with great success in treating pneumonia. James Conca, a respected nuclear scientist from Richland, Washington, told King that 80 percent of pneumonia patients were saved with this therapy. However, it fell into disuse with the development of powerful antibiotics and public apprehension about radiation.

The beauty of the treatment, according to King, is that most hospitals have radiation departments and radiologists trained in treating cancer.

“According to my reporting,” King says, “the moment patients have difficulty breathing, they could be wheeled into radiology and given a low radiation dose to the chest for about 15 minutes. That will stop the ‘cytokine storm,’ the inflammation which is a feature of COVID-19 and pneumonia, which kills you.”

Conca told King that the treated patients can go home after a few days in the hospital — no ICU, no ventilators, and no lung damage.

The radiology departments of three major hospitals — Emory in Atlanta, Loyola near Chicago, and Massachusetts General in Boston — are conducting experiments, King reports.

“Radiation won’t prevent you from getting the disease, but it will dramatically improve your chances of living,” King says, adding, “Conca, whose wife has tested positive for the virus, as made arrangements with his local hospital for her to get radiation right away if she develops breathing difficulty.”

For more information, contact Llewellyn King at llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Conquering Radiation Fear, the Big Challenge

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Can we learn to love radiation? Maybe not, but if we understood it better, we might not be so damned scared of it – a fear that has cost us in many ways, from where reactors are sited to how hospitals handle life-saving nuclear material to the benefits of eradicating deadly bacteria in food.
 
There's a lot of data on the long-term effects of ionizing radiation, ranging from that which was generated by studying the health of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to the environment on the Bikini Atoll, where weapons were tested in the 1950s, to conditions at the Chernobyl meltdown site in Ukraine. The big news is that the data doesn't support the idea that cancer and mutations will follow as night and day after exposure to high doses of radiation.
 
Now the battle has been joined by a Harvard researcher and lecturer in public health, David R. Ropeik. He doesn't suggest that we rush out and encourage dentists to be even more promiscuous in their use of X-rays than they are already, but he does draw attention to the epidemiological data over the past 68 years and what it says: The linkage between very high radiation exposures and cancer and mutations isn’t there.
 
For years, it's been postulated that radiation leads to cancer axiomatically. The data says otherwise.
This glimmer of light, this pinprick, this faint glow could be the beginning of a new day in nuclear, or at least encourage a new look at radiation and its effects. It comes at a time when the American Nuclear Society (ANS), the professional society for nuclear scientists and engineers, is planning a more active public role.
 
The ANS president this year, Donald P. Hoffman, is a hard-driving nuclear advocate, who, in 1985, created the nuclear services company which he still heads, Excel. He'd like to see the 12,000 members of ANS step forward and provide honest witness in disputes about nuclear, believing that the professionals would be more believed than corporate people.
 
He'd also like to boost public knowledge of the uses of nuclear outside of generating electricity, especially in medicine, where it is growing. Already, about one third of hospital patients benefit from nuclear through CAT scans and X-rays to the direct application of radiation to cancer cells. This evolving therapy is less debilitating than chemotherapy or large-area radiation.
 
Hoffman says, “We are seeing nuclear science deployed in new ways,” including non-destructive testing, food irradiation, medicine, space exploration and many more. He believes the uses for nuclear technology are only in their infancy.
 
Outside of the hospital and the laboratory though, the big impediment to nuclear is the fear of radiation or, as popular phenomenon author Malcolm Gladwell would argue, the “fear of fear.”
 
In a recent New York Times piece, Ropeik salutes the Environmental Protection Agency for beginning to take a different look at how we should respond to a nuclear accident or even a terrorist “dirty bomb.” For example, because most radiation can be stopped easily, it may be better to go indoors than to begin a frenzied and hazardous evacuation.
 
As many as 30 years ago, Dr. Mortimer Mendelssohn of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose life’s work has been studying the populations around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told me that the cancers and mutations he expected simply had not occurred. “They’re just not there,” he said.
 
At Bikini Atoll, the Pacific test site, marine life goes on. The vegetation has concentrated some long-lived radionuclides, but the marine life is healthy. At Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident site, wildlife is teeming among the radioactive ruins.
 
Towns within the radiation belt around Fukushima, which are now safe for their populations to return, remain deserted. The Japanese population is in the grip of a national psychosis of fear — not of earthquakes and tsunamis, but of radiation. The earthquake and tsunami that damaged the reactors at Fukushima killed some 18,000 people but radiation killed no one.
 
The fear of fear is a social construct, as Gladwell and before him, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pointed out — a mighty challenge for Hoffman and his ANS. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate