Nuclear medicine annual external occupational dose distribution: Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), year 2005

Brazil has about 300 nuclear medicine services (NMS), 44 of them located in the state of Rio de Janeiro (RJ). Most nuclear medicine staff are routinely monitored for external dose. This paper makes a statistical analysis of all the RJ NMS annual external occupational doses in year 2005. Around 100 professionals of RJ NMS received annual doses >4.0 mSv, considering only external doses, but no one receives doses higher than the mean annual dose limit of 20 mSv. Extremities dosemeters are used by about 10 % of the staff. In some cases, these doses are more than 10 times higher than the dose in thorax. The maximum ratio of extremity dose/thorax dose, in 2005, was 72. This study shows the importance to improve radiation protection procedures in nuclear medicine, mainly because the number of occupational individuals in nuclear medicine and their external doses are increasing. (authors)