Canada ill-prepared for radiation emergencies.

ill-prepared to handle the surge of patients that could result from a large-scale radiation emergency, say Canadian disaster preparedness experts. The ongoing radiation threat in Japan, the result of damage to a nuclear power plant during the country’s recent earthquake, has rekindled concerns about the lackadaisical approach to preparing for such an event in Canada, which has 22 nuclear power plants. “The level of preparedness across the country is poor,” says Dr. Carl Jarvis, an emergency physician and director of disaster planning at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Though many Canadian emergency departments have disaster plans, those plans are often out of date, are infrequently reviewed and are rarely tested using live exercises. Canada also lacks formal guidelines and national standards in preparedness for radiation emergencies. “Health Canada has no formal guidelines, but has developed with partner organisations a training package to help hospitals and the medical community to prepare for radiation emergencies,” Leslie Meerburg, media relations officer for Health Canada, writes in an email. “Health Canada provides this training free of charge to medical communities interested in hosting a training session.” That training package is the METER (Medical Emergency Treatment for Exposures to Radiation) course. From 2007–2009, Jarvis taught the course to first responders and first receivers across Canada. According to Jarvis, the impetus for creating the program was to increase preparedness for a possible terrorist attack during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. But national interest in preparing medical professionals for radiation emergencies appears to have waned after the Olympics, says Jarvis, who considers this training too important to be tied only to large events. “We need to get some level of government interested in funding ongoing teaching, particularly in communities near nuclear reactors,” he says. During his training sessions with emergency medical services professionals, Jarvis noticed that there are many misconceptions about radiation and the health risks it poses. For one, few could distinguish between people who were contaminated by radiation (have radioactive material on their bodies and thus require decontamination) and those who were merely exposed to radiation. Some emergency medical services personnel believed it was unsafe to transport a contaminated individual to a hospital. Though this may require that the ambulance later be decontaminated, it poses little risk to paramedics if they take the necessary precautions. “Provided they are wearing proper PPE, personal protective equipment, there is negligible risk to them,” says Jarvis. These misconceptions will likely persist without ongoing training in Canada. Unfortunately, says Jarvis, emergency department staff and paramedics who wish to be trained in this area may have to travel to the United States, where chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear (CBRN) disaster preparedness is taken much more seriously. “There are no Canadian courses where you can send emergency department staff to receive training in CBRN, which is just a travesty,” says Jarvis. “How can this void be left year after year?” One major reason there is little momentum in Canada toward improving disaster preparedness is that responsibility for doing so falls Evacuees from the village of Kawauchi, Japan undergo screening tests for signs of nuclear radiation after returning from brief trips back to their homes inside the restricted zone around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the aftermath of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked the country on March 11th, triggering a sevenmetre tsunami. R eu te rs /Is se i K at o