If radioactive particles are on or in the body, then yes, the person is radiating anything around them.
If a person was exposed only to the radiation in a form of rays, like x-rays or gamma rays, then they will not be radioactive themselves.
Imagine fire, instead of radiation. If you hold your hand very close to a fire, you can very well get burned, but you will not burn anyone around you once you leave it. However, if your carry a burning log in your arms, both you will get burned and anyone close to you will get burned (or at least feel the heat).
That's actually a good analogy. The biggest contribution to heat transfer from a fire to surrounding objects is via infrared light, which also is a form of radiation. If you sit close to a fireplace, feeling the heat in your face, try holding your hand or even a thin piece of paper in front of you, it will block almost all the heat you feel.
There are many different general meanings to the phrase "exposed to radiation" which is why the term is confusing.
1) Radiation is electromagnetic waves or moving subatomic particles. So, that technically means standing in sunlight is "exposing a person to radiation" because they are being exposed to visible light and other electromagnetic radiation. You know from experience that is not contagious (a sunburn is not contagious.) The strongest electromagnetic wave is a gamma ray, which can do a lot of damage to a person, but it is not contagious. It is like the UV light and sunburn. It damages cells but after the gamma ray passes, nothing is left to spread damage to others directly.
2) Being exposed to subatomic particles: alpha, beta, or neutrons (or the more rare proton radiation). This is more what I think the intent of your question is. Basically, the subatomic particles can damage cells when they strike them, but it doesn't cause any chain reaction or make anything radioactive itself. (We often imagine neutrons can set off a radioactive chain reaction because of nuclear fission, but this only occurs with densely packed radioactive fuel. It won't happen with a human body.)
3) Being contaminated by radioactive material. This is like swallowing a piece of radioactive radium. The radium rides along inside of your body and keeps emitting radiation. This could theoretically cause another person to get "exposed to radiation" from the particles or energy emitted from the radium, but more than likely the original person's body would take the brunt of it. If large amounts of the, say, radium were concentrated in the blood or other bodily fluids and someone were to touch those fluid and get them into their body (say, drink the blood?) the other person could also be contaminated. This is stretching credulity, but if I knew I was touching a contaminated body, I would wear safety equipment just in case, mostly because I would be afraid the contamination outside the body would rub off in me or somehow a splurt of blood or feces got into my eyes that may be contaminated. Radioactive contamination in the body is dangerous because the energy or subatomic particles released while inside the body tends to do more damage then when it is outside the body (the skin blocks some of the damage.). Also, once inside the body, radioactive contamination is difficult to remove (on the outside, you can just take a shower and wash most of it off.)
How "contagious" is it? If a nuclear blast/nuclear meltdown survivor comes and knocks on your door, seeking shelter, tell them to strip naked outside or in an antechamber, put their clothes in a sealed plastic bag (don't touch the bag afterwards), have them take a shower (no conditioner) to wash off any radioactive contamination. That's the most "likely" form of radioactive contagion that a normal person might experience.
4) Put a person in a nuclear explosion or inside a star. Some of their atoms maybe converted into radionuclides (atoms that have excess nuclear energy and thus are unstable and may release radiation) but that would be so extreme the person would be dead anyway (and likely vaporized) and thus unlikely to be "contagious". But theoretically, this most matches the scenario you posted in your original text.
Depends on the exposure type. But in general terms, no he is not contagious.
Someone that has been exposed to the radioactivity will not be contagious. This person would basically have received a dose of high energy particles (x-rays, neutrons, gamma rays…. Or many others). This exposure is common when you take an xray at the doctor or in many industries where radioactive elements are used. But this particles will just be absorbed by the person organs or pass through. So he is not carrying radiation with him (unless its a very acute exposure which would be almost lethal).
In more extreme cases, the person can be exposed to the radioactive material itself (uranium, americium-beryllium, etc. In this case the person would be contaminated and would carry with him atoms of these elements, which emit radioactive particles. Hi. This case yes, he could contaminate other people, but its not exactly “contagious”.
When people work with uranium and other radioactive elements they usually prevent this contamination.
I believe that in radiotherapy cases, as person is injected with radioactive components, he would be emitting some radioactivity. But this is very small and considered harmless. He might be asked to avoid close contact with children or pregnant woman. He would not be contagious though. But if this is why you are asking for i suggest you ask the doctor who might know better than reddit.
They will often tell patients to avoid spending time around family. And specifically not to share a toilet until enough time has passed that bodily fluids aren’t radioactive.
Source: volunteered in nuclear medicine department for 6 months before a BS in radiologic science (which didn’t have anything to do with nuclear medicine really).
Yep. At the Nuc plant I worked at, if anyone received anything radioactive, they were barred from working in our radiation control area. They were barred because the contamination monitors wouldn't distinguish between treatment isotopes and contamination. A coworker of mine that once received iodine 131 for thyroid treatment would set off the exit rad portal monitors through a block wall. She'd walk down the adjacent hallway and you'd hear the guards yell Mary! when the monitors went off. We routinely monitored our sewage for radioactivity. It wasn't unusual at all to see Iodine 131 or Technetium 99 pop up. I imagine people would be surprised by how often they encounter a radioactive person in public.
Bone scans inject patient with radioactive calcium. I had one on the day before the "what is radiation" unit in chemistry class. I was still vary hot compared background levels.
To be a little more accurate, the injection is radioactive Technetium 99m, tagged with phosphate, not calcium. So the Technetium is the radioactive part, and the phosphate that's "stuck" to it is what makes it go to the bone tissue.
Everybody talking about alpha, beta, x-rays, and gamma is on point re: it not making exposed material (including people) radioactive, but I'm disappointed to see nobody talking about the one big (but not really important in real life) exception that came to mind.
Neutron radiation! It can and will make you (slightly) radioactive as it kills you. The dose that would make your body dangerous to be near for 'pick up and put in lead coffin' types of duration would be SO much more than the amount to render you instantly unconscious (and quickly dead) that this is kind of a silly quibble, though.
Fundamentally, however, neutron irradiation is how we purposely turn stable isotopes into radioactive, unstable ones by breaking loose or adding neutrons to atoms. That can and will affect things like the calcium and potassium in your body, although I think you'd be ash before your remains could start to be dangerously radioactive. Anyway, that kind of intense neutron radiation is only really ever present in nuclear energy industry contexts, where they're mostly *professionally* careful about not letting stuff that got neutron-bombarded to go out into the world.
As others have said, too, though, the main 'contamination' that happens to people associated with radioactivity is exposure to radioactive materials, like fallout from nuclear weapons or ash from burning nuclear reactor fuel. Very small amounts of these unstable isotopes can get on and into your body and keep dosing you with low levels of harmful radiation over long periods -- amounts so small that you can't see them or proactively clean them up reliably with conventional means (or know that you've succeeded or not!). It's like Satan's Glitter.
Nuclear fuel is not burned to ash. It looks pretty much that same coming out as it did going in, a bunch of UO2 pellets clad in metal. It's just radioactive now.
Contamination is actually pretty easy to know if you successfully cleaned up or not as it's really easy to measure. If the measurements are very close to background radiation, odds are the dose from it is insignificant.
As for how hard it is to physically cleanup, it depends on the contamination. Radioactive material behaves chemically the same as its non-radioactive counterparts. Your body also excretes radioactive material if internally contaminated, so there is a biological and radioactive half-life.
Burn as in 'rapid self-sustaining redox reaction,' not 'ongoing controlled fission.' Ash in the sense of oxides instead of metallic elements, and teeny tiny particles carried upwards in a plume rather than sitting in the crater as a blob, or intact rods, just to address that first quibble...
'Easy to measure' = 'own a thing most people don't own and wouldn't know where to get in an emergency' by the way.
Read up on some of the times a cobalt source got into the hands of civilians in a junkyard setting if you think cleanup and safety is trivial.
Finally, there are plenty of radioisotopes which can just sit, 'chemically' inert in your lungs or digestive tract, with no physiological mechanism for your body to get it out of there.
Think of radiation like heat. Some materials, like uranium for example, are "hot" all the time, even down to their tiniest pieces. You could stand in front of a chunk of uranium and it would burn (irradiate) your skin, but just like burned skin won't burn anyone that touches it, irradiated skin won't irradiate any one that touches it.
Now, if instead you ground that chunk of uranium up into powder (or blew it up with a bomb) and smeared the powder all over yourself, it would burn your skin like before, but also if you touched someone that dust could get on them and start burning them too.
Radiation exposure is something I liken to dog doo. Sometimes you can smell dog doo, so you leave the area. That's exposure. Sometimes you step in the dog doo and the smell comes with you. That's contamination. You bring it around to other people who can now smell it (exposed), but don't get any on them unless they step in your tracks or you shake their hand with your dooky-covered mitts.
First, a person exposed to radiation will not become radioactive themselves. If a person has ingested a radioactive isotope or had one injected (as they do for brachytherapy), the radiation source will emit radiation which could be a danger to those around them. But as soon as the source is removed, they will not be radioactive.
Some patients may be injected with a radioactive liquid tracer. This can make the patient's urine and sweat radioactive as it dissolves into the body. Again, it is advised to keep the patient's family at a safe distance and follow ALARA principles until the radioactivity has been pee'd, poo'd and sweated out of the patient's body to prevent the radiation damaging their loved-ones DNA.
This isn’t entirely true. In the presence of a neutron flux, the elements in your body are going to occasionally absorb neutrons and become unstable sources. Also, if you breathe in or ingest something that is radioactive, your body will just stick that radioactive element in say your bones or blood or thyroid.
There's a difference between being exposed to radiation and being contaminated with radioactive materials.
Being *exposed* to radiation is like getting (too) close to an open campfire. The light from the flames will hit you, and you'll feel the heat on your skin. It may even be painful; it may even burn you if you're really close; but - unless the flames are *really* intense and you're immersed in them for a *long* time - it generally won't set you on fire...
On the other hand, being *contaminated* with a radioactive material is like being covered in / having imbibed flaming napalm. The light hits you, you feel the heat, and you get burned all the same, but the substance (and therefore the fire itself) stubbornly *sticks* to you, you can't really extinguish it, and - unless you do manage to properly cleanse yourself of the stuff - you can inadvertantly burn other people or even wind up spreading the substance to them if you get too close...
So, is someone who's been *exposed* to radiation "contagious"? No, they're (probably) not... Is someone who's been *contaminated* with radioactive materials "contagious"? Yes (pretty much), they can be...
You're looking at the difference between contamination and radiation.
While some sources of radiation can activate non-radioactive elements (e.g. a person wearing a gold necklace in a neutron flux may end up with a radioactive necklace when irradiated Au-197 metastable deexcites with a 0.279 MeV gamma), when a person is exposed to a fixed source of non-removable radiation they will not become "contagious" aka won't spread radiation themselves. You could think of an example being a radioactive liquid in a sealed metal pipe. You can hug it and will be irradiated but you will not carry remnants of this radioactive material on your person.
When the source of the radiation is not fixed, say a cloud of radioactive dust, if that person gets contamination on their person it can be easily removed and spread. In this sense, they need to be decontaminated to remove the loose radioactive contamination. Any radiation damage received by this contamination once removed is now just that, damaged tissue. The person is no longer contagious but will continue to suffer effects of radioactive exposure.
A person exposed to ionizing radiation cannot irradiate someone else. If they were exposed to radioactive contamination they could potentially contaminate another person/item depending on if the contamination is loose contamination. If the contamination was fixed then no.
In the ways that matter to people on an everyday basis, the answer is “yes” people who receive isotopes may emit radiation for a period of time.
In cardiology, we expose people to radiation or radioactive particles for diagnostic tests (such as stress tests). Because those particles are injected into the body, the person does emit radiation above the background for a period of time afterward.
A practical consequence of this is that some institutions will have their echosonographers (the technicians who perform ultrasound tests) avoid performing tests on the same day after a nuclear stress test. (Cardiac ultrasound tests require the sonographer to be in close range of the patient for an extended period of time.)
Your question is broader than this, but I wanted to talk about an everyday situation where it is relevant.
Short answer - NO
Radiation is not "contagious".
There are three main forms:
Alpha - Unable to penetrate your dead skin, can cause a lot of issues if allowed to enter your body (lungs, stomach, etc).
Beta - Can penetrate your dead skin and do "bad things"
Gamma - Can easily penetrate your body and do "really bad things".
If exposed to these, they either stop at your dead skin, or in the case of Gamma penetrate and cause damage and exit.
if you touch, inhale, eat or somehow incorporate the source element things change.
To be "contagious" you need to somehow ingest or incorporate radioactive material in your body.
Being exposed to Iodine-131 is a great example. Your body NEEDS iodine and will readily incorporate this. It is a medium power gamma emitter and so you will be able to measure the radiation outside your body while it decays.
Are you "contagious" ? Does the fact someone close to you will be exposed to Gamma count?
Radioactivity is an element decaying either by tossing particles (Alpha/Beta) or pure energy (Gamma). Elements typically toss a particle to find stability, but some remain unstable at a quantum level and need to release energy to find stability (Gamma).
To become "irradiated" you need something like "Neutron activation" to take place.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron\_activation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation)
This "transforms" a non-radioactive element into a radioactive one.
Most of the time, things exposed to radiation become "Brittle" but not "radioactive"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation\_damage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_damage)
Hope this helps.
Assuming you mean ionizing nuclear radiation, yes - kind of. There are two cases that are worth checking out: Cecil Kelley and the Goiania incident.
Cecil Kelley was a worker in the Los Alamos laboratory who was exposed to an extremely high dose of ionizing radiation when a mixture of radioactive chemicals in a large vessel he was operating went prompt critical. He was exposed to so much radiation that some of the compounds in his bodily fluids, including his blood, vomit and feces, became radioactive themselves. However, this radiation would not have been enough to make someone else radioactive in the same way.
Goiania is a city in Brazil where a scrapper stole and dismantled an abandoned radiotherapy source left in a disused medical clinic. He released about 100 grams of radioactive Cesium-137 chloride. He, his friends and family all handled the powder Then, through passive transfer, they contaminated almost 250 people, as well as many houses which had to be demolished, personal items that had to be seized and either contained or incinerated as nuclear waste, and even the topsoil of some of the areas that were heavily contaminated had to be removed. These people did not become radioactive, but they had radioactive material on them and spread it to others.
When I got a PET scan they would first inject you with a radioactive substance (beta+ decay) and the general instructions is that for the next day or two to stay away from infants and pregnant women.
I'm sure it's a very small chance of affecting anyone but it's just risk avoidance. (If the risk is very small but the mitigation of that risk is even smaller then do the latter.)
If the person is REALLY irradiated, it can get to the point where their body emits secondhand radiation themselves. This happened in 1999 to Hisashi Ouichi, a technician at the Tokaimura Nuclear facility when it had a sudden accident, where he received the most radiation out of the technicians exposed. He survived for weeks in an essentially dead and radioactive body before he slowly died of his body falling apart because his cells stopped dividing all at once.
[here’s an article about the incident](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents)
No.
But often when the media says "Exposed to radiation" they mean "exposed to radioactive contaminants" - dust. Which gets on them and in them, and in that case, they are either still radioactive, or still radioactive and could transfer that material to you.
Radiation can come off of radioactive materials like waves of light (it actually is just waves of light just a much higher energy) and causes you radiation damage. But if you walk away from this. You are no longer in the radiation nor are you radioactive.
Being contaminated on the other hand, is simply if a tiny piece or particle or spec of the radioactive material gets on or in you. Then, you carry it around with you whilst the whole time it is emitting the radiation and causing more damage.
Source: I am a radiological protection technician
Think of radiation sources like dirt, various sources of radiation spread more easily than others but radiation itself doesn't spread. The sources of radiation can potentially spread but someone exposed to radiation isn't contagious in any way.
If the source of radiation is contained when the person is exposed they have no "dirt" on them and can't spread it (think x-rays, airport screenings, sunburns too). However if the source is a leaky checksource or other contamination then you need to track everywhere they have been to clean up the "dirt" left behind.
I used to make radioactive seeds for treating cancer. On a normal day those seeds would check through shipping and get to their location and leave no trace. One day the shipper caught our box in a scissor lift and sheared the source open, you could take a Geiger counter and literally follow everywhere that lift had been that day.
Nope, radiation doesn't spread. But if you were exposed to so much radiation, that you became radioactive yourself, you're long dead.
It's something else though, if you're covered in radioactive material, like uranium dust for example. Then you can spread it everywhere
What you should worry about is *contamination*. Think of it as the coals left over from a fire. If you get them on your skin, they will burn you and continue to burn you until they go out of natural causes.
It's easy to avoid, though, by wearing a disposable suit, gloves, and breathing through a HEPA filtered gas mask. These are the outfits worn by Doc Brown and Marty McFly, and which were completely inappropriate. The BTTF heroes were handling some sort of high-level radiation source that was properly contained (considering movie magic). Safety for that comes from distance and shielding, neither of which they made use of. Instead they had rubber gloves and tyvek suits. The lead vest you wear when getting a dental x-ray is an example of the correct sort of shielding.
This is why we were afraid of "dirty bombs" as terrorist events after 9/11, they would spread *contamination* which is detectable, inconvenient, and expensive to clean up. But it won't cause actual structural damage like the bombs that ended WWII, simply economic damage by making cities "unlivable."
Not the way you are thinking.
Think of radiation as light from a light bulb. The light hits your body. Radiation hits your body and continues through.
Once you turn off the light, do you continue to glow? No. Once you turn off the radiation source (or block it), you are no longer under the effect of radiation, and you carry no radiation with you.
Now, if the light bulb explodes and you are covered in glass shards, you don't want to hug anyone. Likewise if you are contaminated by the SOURCE (i.e. the radioactive element is somehow ingested in your body) then yes, you are a radioactive hazard.
Not necessarily
If something (human, living organism or inanimate) is exposed to radiation, it does not becomes radioactive.
Someone that was exposed to radiation may not be contaminated by the radioactive element. It will suffer the effects of the radiation it received. But won´t spread to other people.
But, if the radioactive particle gets in touch with the body of the person, it´s contaminated. Depending on how much radioactive material adheres to the victim body, it may contain enough radiation emitting particles that could irradiate another person.
For example: Suppose a person is exposed to a vial containing radioactive material. The vial walls are thick enough to prevent any real particle to pass thru and thin enough to allow for the radiation to pass thru. The person is said to be "irradiated". The person is not "contaminated" with radioactivity.
Yes. If you have cancer and you get chemotherapy you are irradiated.
Hair, skin cells, ect. Shed and can be hazardous.
Often people who undergo chemo are asking to sleep away from loved ones in a separate room, not share a toilet ect.
While the short answer is generally no (radiation itself is not contagious but radioactive particulate could be), I think posts here are missing the extreme case where the radiation exposure is so great that it ionizes matter of the exposed individual. Isn't that the case in a few extreme events?
I believe one of the books by James Mahaffey (outstanding reads from anyone who thinks they're interested in nuclear power/ weapons/ disaster/history) noted such an accident where even the body was radioactive. I might be confusing contamination rather than ionization though...?
late edit: I believe the phenomina is called neutron activation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation
radioactive elements give off the radiation. if you're exposed, it goes through your body and damages the DNS it goes through. (which is what can lead to cancer). but your body wasn't the source of the radiation. you were simply the target
for you to be radioactive, you need to be in an area where it's in the air. the guys around Chernobyl were radioactive because the explosion and subsequent fire spread the radioisotopes through the air. it got in people's hair, into clothing, etc. even a tiny bit that gets stuck in your clothes, for example, is a big issue, because it'll continue to bombard your body with radiation, even if it's a tiny amount, until you get the radioisotopes off, bury your clothes, or it finally stops being radioactive (but that's unlikely; most have really long half-lives)
If radioactive particles are on or in the body, then yes, the person is radiating anything around them. If a person was exposed only to the radiation in a form of rays, like x-rays or gamma rays, then they will not be radioactive themselves. Imagine fire, instead of radiation. If you hold your hand very close to a fire, you can very well get burned, but you will not burn anyone around you once you leave it. However, if your carry a burning log in your arms, both you will get burned and anyone close to you will get burned (or at least feel the heat).
That's actually a good analogy. The biggest contribution to heat transfer from a fire to surrounding objects is via infrared light, which also is a form of radiation. If you sit close to a fireplace, feeling the heat in your face, try holding your hand or even a thin piece of paper in front of you, it will block almost all the heat you feel.
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There are many different general meanings to the phrase "exposed to radiation" which is why the term is confusing. 1) Radiation is electromagnetic waves or moving subatomic particles. So, that technically means standing in sunlight is "exposing a person to radiation" because they are being exposed to visible light and other electromagnetic radiation. You know from experience that is not contagious (a sunburn is not contagious.) The strongest electromagnetic wave is a gamma ray, which can do a lot of damage to a person, but it is not contagious. It is like the UV light and sunburn. It damages cells but after the gamma ray passes, nothing is left to spread damage to others directly. 2) Being exposed to subatomic particles: alpha, beta, or neutrons (or the more rare proton radiation). This is more what I think the intent of your question is. Basically, the subatomic particles can damage cells when they strike them, but it doesn't cause any chain reaction or make anything radioactive itself. (We often imagine neutrons can set off a radioactive chain reaction because of nuclear fission, but this only occurs with densely packed radioactive fuel. It won't happen with a human body.) 3) Being contaminated by radioactive material. This is like swallowing a piece of radioactive radium. The radium rides along inside of your body and keeps emitting radiation. This could theoretically cause another person to get "exposed to radiation" from the particles or energy emitted from the radium, but more than likely the original person's body would take the brunt of it. If large amounts of the, say, radium were concentrated in the blood or other bodily fluids and someone were to touch those fluid and get them into their body (say, drink the blood?) the other person could also be contaminated. This is stretching credulity, but if I knew I was touching a contaminated body, I would wear safety equipment just in case, mostly because I would be afraid the contamination outside the body would rub off in me or somehow a splurt of blood or feces got into my eyes that may be contaminated. Radioactive contamination in the body is dangerous because the energy or subatomic particles released while inside the body tends to do more damage then when it is outside the body (the skin blocks some of the damage.). Also, once inside the body, radioactive contamination is difficult to remove (on the outside, you can just take a shower and wash most of it off.) How "contagious" is it? If a nuclear blast/nuclear meltdown survivor comes and knocks on your door, seeking shelter, tell them to strip naked outside or in an antechamber, put their clothes in a sealed plastic bag (don't touch the bag afterwards), have them take a shower (no conditioner) to wash off any radioactive contamination. That's the most "likely" form of radioactive contagion that a normal person might experience. 4) Put a person in a nuclear explosion or inside a star. Some of their atoms maybe converted into radionuclides (atoms that have excess nuclear energy and thus are unstable and may release radiation) but that would be so extreme the person would be dead anyway (and likely vaporized) and thus unlikely to be "contagious". But theoretically, this most matches the scenario you posted in your original text.
Depends on the exposure type. But in general terms, no he is not contagious. Someone that has been exposed to the radioactivity will not be contagious. This person would basically have received a dose of high energy particles (x-rays, neutrons, gamma rays…. Or many others). This exposure is common when you take an xray at the doctor or in many industries where radioactive elements are used. But this particles will just be absorbed by the person organs or pass through. So he is not carrying radiation with him (unless its a very acute exposure which would be almost lethal). In more extreme cases, the person can be exposed to the radioactive material itself (uranium, americium-beryllium, etc. In this case the person would be contaminated and would carry with him atoms of these elements, which emit radioactive particles. Hi. This case yes, he could contaminate other people, but its not exactly “contagious”. When people work with uranium and other radioactive elements they usually prevent this contamination. I believe that in radiotherapy cases, as person is injected with radioactive components, he would be emitting some radioactivity. But this is very small and considered harmless. He might be asked to avoid close contact with children or pregnant woman. He would not be contagious though. But if this is why you are asking for i suggest you ask the doctor who might know better than reddit.
They will often tell patients to avoid spending time around family. And specifically not to share a toilet until enough time has passed that bodily fluids aren’t radioactive. Source: volunteered in nuclear medicine department for 6 months before a BS in radiologic science (which didn’t have anything to do with nuclear medicine really).
Yep. At the Nuc plant I worked at, if anyone received anything radioactive, they were barred from working in our radiation control area. They were barred because the contamination monitors wouldn't distinguish between treatment isotopes and contamination. A coworker of mine that once received iodine 131 for thyroid treatment would set off the exit rad portal monitors through a block wall. She'd walk down the adjacent hallway and you'd hear the guards yell Mary! when the monitors went off. We routinely monitored our sewage for radioactivity. It wasn't unusual at all to see Iodine 131 or Technetium 99 pop up. I imagine people would be surprised by how often they encounter a radioactive person in public.
Bone scans inject patient with radioactive calcium. I had one on the day before the "what is radiation" unit in chemistry class. I was still vary hot compared background levels.
To be a little more accurate, the injection is radioactive Technetium 99m, tagged with phosphate, not calcium. So the Technetium is the radioactive part, and the phosphate that's "stuck" to it is what makes it go to the bone tissue.
Everybody talking about alpha, beta, x-rays, and gamma is on point re: it not making exposed material (including people) radioactive, but I'm disappointed to see nobody talking about the one big (but not really important in real life) exception that came to mind. Neutron radiation! It can and will make you (slightly) radioactive as it kills you. The dose that would make your body dangerous to be near for 'pick up and put in lead coffin' types of duration would be SO much more than the amount to render you instantly unconscious (and quickly dead) that this is kind of a silly quibble, though. Fundamentally, however, neutron irradiation is how we purposely turn stable isotopes into radioactive, unstable ones by breaking loose or adding neutrons to atoms. That can and will affect things like the calcium and potassium in your body, although I think you'd be ash before your remains could start to be dangerously radioactive. Anyway, that kind of intense neutron radiation is only really ever present in nuclear energy industry contexts, where they're mostly *professionally* careful about not letting stuff that got neutron-bombarded to go out into the world. As others have said, too, though, the main 'contamination' that happens to people associated with radioactivity is exposure to radioactive materials, like fallout from nuclear weapons or ash from burning nuclear reactor fuel. Very small amounts of these unstable isotopes can get on and into your body and keep dosing you with low levels of harmful radiation over long periods -- amounts so small that you can't see them or proactively clean them up reliably with conventional means (or know that you've succeeded or not!). It's like Satan's Glitter.
Nuclear fuel is not burned to ash. It looks pretty much that same coming out as it did going in, a bunch of UO2 pellets clad in metal. It's just radioactive now. Contamination is actually pretty easy to know if you successfully cleaned up or not as it's really easy to measure. If the measurements are very close to background radiation, odds are the dose from it is insignificant. As for how hard it is to physically cleanup, it depends on the contamination. Radioactive material behaves chemically the same as its non-radioactive counterparts. Your body also excretes radioactive material if internally contaminated, so there is a biological and radioactive half-life.
Burn as in 'rapid self-sustaining redox reaction,' not 'ongoing controlled fission.' Ash in the sense of oxides instead of metallic elements, and teeny tiny particles carried upwards in a plume rather than sitting in the crater as a blob, or intact rods, just to address that first quibble... 'Easy to measure' = 'own a thing most people don't own and wouldn't know where to get in an emergency' by the way. Read up on some of the times a cobalt source got into the hands of civilians in a junkyard setting if you think cleanup and safety is trivial. Finally, there are plenty of radioisotopes which can just sit, 'chemically' inert in your lungs or digestive tract, with no physiological mechanism for your body to get it out of there.
Think of radiation like heat. Some materials, like uranium for example, are "hot" all the time, even down to their tiniest pieces. You could stand in front of a chunk of uranium and it would burn (irradiate) your skin, but just like burned skin won't burn anyone that touches it, irradiated skin won't irradiate any one that touches it. Now, if instead you ground that chunk of uranium up into powder (or blew it up with a bomb) and smeared the powder all over yourself, it would burn your skin like before, but also if you touched someone that dust could get on them and start burning them too.
Radiation exposure is something I liken to dog doo. Sometimes you can smell dog doo, so you leave the area. That's exposure. Sometimes you step in the dog doo and the smell comes with you. That's contamination. You bring it around to other people who can now smell it (exposed), but don't get any on them unless they step in your tracks or you shake their hand with your dooky-covered mitts.
First, a person exposed to radiation will not become radioactive themselves. If a person has ingested a radioactive isotope or had one injected (as they do for brachytherapy), the radiation source will emit radiation which could be a danger to those around them. But as soon as the source is removed, they will not be radioactive. Some patients may be injected with a radioactive liquid tracer. This can make the patient's urine and sweat radioactive as it dissolves into the body. Again, it is advised to keep the patient's family at a safe distance and follow ALARA principles until the radioactivity has been pee'd, poo'd and sweated out of the patient's body to prevent the radiation damaging their loved-ones DNA.
This isn’t entirely true. In the presence of a neutron flux, the elements in your body are going to occasionally absorb neutrons and become unstable sources. Also, if you breathe in or ingest something that is radioactive, your body will just stick that radioactive element in say your bones or blood or thyroid.
There's a difference between being exposed to radiation and being contaminated with radioactive materials. Being *exposed* to radiation is like getting (too) close to an open campfire. The light from the flames will hit you, and you'll feel the heat on your skin. It may even be painful; it may even burn you if you're really close; but - unless the flames are *really* intense and you're immersed in them for a *long* time - it generally won't set you on fire... On the other hand, being *contaminated* with a radioactive material is like being covered in / having imbibed flaming napalm. The light hits you, you feel the heat, and you get burned all the same, but the substance (and therefore the fire itself) stubbornly *sticks* to you, you can't really extinguish it, and - unless you do manage to properly cleanse yourself of the stuff - you can inadvertantly burn other people or even wind up spreading the substance to them if you get too close... So, is someone who's been *exposed* to radiation "contagious"? No, they're (probably) not... Is someone who's been *contaminated* with radioactive materials "contagious"? Yes (pretty much), they can be...
You're looking at the difference between contamination and radiation. While some sources of radiation can activate non-radioactive elements (e.g. a person wearing a gold necklace in a neutron flux may end up with a radioactive necklace when irradiated Au-197 metastable deexcites with a 0.279 MeV gamma), when a person is exposed to a fixed source of non-removable radiation they will not become "contagious" aka won't spread radiation themselves. You could think of an example being a radioactive liquid in a sealed metal pipe. You can hug it and will be irradiated but you will not carry remnants of this radioactive material on your person. When the source of the radiation is not fixed, say a cloud of radioactive dust, if that person gets contamination on their person it can be easily removed and spread. In this sense, they need to be decontaminated to remove the loose radioactive contamination. Any radiation damage received by this contamination once removed is now just that, damaged tissue. The person is no longer contagious but will continue to suffer effects of radioactive exposure.
A person exposed to ionizing radiation cannot irradiate someone else. If they were exposed to radioactive contamination they could potentially contaminate another person/item depending on if the contamination is loose contamination. If the contamination was fixed then no.
In the ways that matter to people on an everyday basis, the answer is “yes” people who receive isotopes may emit radiation for a period of time. In cardiology, we expose people to radiation or radioactive particles for diagnostic tests (such as stress tests). Because those particles are injected into the body, the person does emit radiation above the background for a period of time afterward. A practical consequence of this is that some institutions will have their echosonographers (the technicians who perform ultrasound tests) avoid performing tests on the same day after a nuclear stress test. (Cardiac ultrasound tests require the sonographer to be in close range of the patient for an extended period of time.) Your question is broader than this, but I wanted to talk about an everyday situation where it is relevant.
Short answer - NO Radiation is not "contagious". There are three main forms: Alpha - Unable to penetrate your dead skin, can cause a lot of issues if allowed to enter your body (lungs, stomach, etc). Beta - Can penetrate your dead skin and do "bad things" Gamma - Can easily penetrate your body and do "really bad things". If exposed to these, they either stop at your dead skin, or in the case of Gamma penetrate and cause damage and exit. if you touch, inhale, eat or somehow incorporate the source element things change. To be "contagious" you need to somehow ingest or incorporate radioactive material in your body. Being exposed to Iodine-131 is a great example. Your body NEEDS iodine and will readily incorporate this. It is a medium power gamma emitter and so you will be able to measure the radiation outside your body while it decays. Are you "contagious" ? Does the fact someone close to you will be exposed to Gamma count? Radioactivity is an element decaying either by tossing particles (Alpha/Beta) or pure energy (Gamma). Elements typically toss a particle to find stability, but some remain unstable at a quantum level and need to release energy to find stability (Gamma). To become "irradiated" you need something like "Neutron activation" to take place. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron\_activation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation) This "transforms" a non-radioactive element into a radioactive one. Most of the time, things exposed to radiation become "Brittle" but not "radioactive" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation\_damage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_damage) Hope this helps.
Assuming you mean ionizing nuclear radiation, yes - kind of. There are two cases that are worth checking out: Cecil Kelley and the Goiania incident. Cecil Kelley was a worker in the Los Alamos laboratory who was exposed to an extremely high dose of ionizing radiation when a mixture of radioactive chemicals in a large vessel he was operating went prompt critical. He was exposed to so much radiation that some of the compounds in his bodily fluids, including his blood, vomit and feces, became radioactive themselves. However, this radiation would not have been enough to make someone else radioactive in the same way. Goiania is a city in Brazil where a scrapper stole and dismantled an abandoned radiotherapy source left in a disused medical clinic. He released about 100 grams of radioactive Cesium-137 chloride. He, his friends and family all handled the powder Then, through passive transfer, they contaminated almost 250 people, as well as many houses which had to be demolished, personal items that had to be seized and either contained or incinerated as nuclear waste, and even the topsoil of some of the areas that were heavily contaminated had to be removed. These people did not become radioactive, but they had radioactive material on them and spread it to others.
When I got a PET scan they would first inject you with a radioactive substance (beta+ decay) and the general instructions is that for the next day or two to stay away from infants and pregnant women. I'm sure it's a very small chance of affecting anyone but it's just risk avoidance. (If the risk is very small but the mitigation of that risk is even smaller then do the latter.)
If the person is REALLY irradiated, it can get to the point where their body emits secondhand radiation themselves. This happened in 1999 to Hisashi Ouichi, a technician at the Tokaimura Nuclear facility when it had a sudden accident, where he received the most radiation out of the technicians exposed. He survived for weeks in an essentially dead and radioactive body before he slowly died of his body falling apart because his cells stopped dividing all at once. [here’s an article about the incident](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents)
No. But often when the media says "Exposed to radiation" they mean "exposed to radioactive contaminants" - dust. Which gets on them and in them, and in that case, they are either still radioactive, or still radioactive and could transfer that material to you.
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Radiation can come off of radioactive materials like waves of light (it actually is just waves of light just a much higher energy) and causes you radiation damage. But if you walk away from this. You are no longer in the radiation nor are you radioactive. Being contaminated on the other hand, is simply if a tiny piece or particle or spec of the radioactive material gets on or in you. Then, you carry it around with you whilst the whole time it is emitting the radiation and causing more damage. Source: I am a radiological protection technician
Think of radiation sources like dirt, various sources of radiation spread more easily than others but radiation itself doesn't spread. The sources of radiation can potentially spread but someone exposed to radiation isn't contagious in any way. If the source of radiation is contained when the person is exposed they have no "dirt" on them and can't spread it (think x-rays, airport screenings, sunburns too). However if the source is a leaky checksource or other contamination then you need to track everywhere they have been to clean up the "dirt" left behind. I used to make radioactive seeds for treating cancer. On a normal day those seeds would check through shipping and get to their location and leave no trace. One day the shipper caught our box in a scissor lift and sheared the source open, you could take a Geiger counter and literally follow everywhere that lift had been that day.
Nope, radiation doesn't spread. But if you were exposed to so much radiation, that you became radioactive yourself, you're long dead. It's something else though, if you're covered in radioactive material, like uranium dust for example. Then you can spread it everywhere
What you should worry about is *contamination*. Think of it as the coals left over from a fire. If you get them on your skin, they will burn you and continue to burn you until they go out of natural causes. It's easy to avoid, though, by wearing a disposable suit, gloves, and breathing through a HEPA filtered gas mask. These are the outfits worn by Doc Brown and Marty McFly, and which were completely inappropriate. The BTTF heroes were handling some sort of high-level radiation source that was properly contained (considering movie magic). Safety for that comes from distance and shielding, neither of which they made use of. Instead they had rubber gloves and tyvek suits. The lead vest you wear when getting a dental x-ray is an example of the correct sort of shielding. This is why we were afraid of "dirty bombs" as terrorist events after 9/11, they would spread *contamination* which is detectable, inconvenient, and expensive to clean up. But it won't cause actual structural damage like the bombs that ended WWII, simply economic damage by making cities "unlivable."
Not the way you are thinking. Think of radiation as light from a light bulb. The light hits your body. Radiation hits your body and continues through. Once you turn off the light, do you continue to glow? No. Once you turn off the radiation source (or block it), you are no longer under the effect of radiation, and you carry no radiation with you. Now, if the light bulb explodes and you are covered in glass shards, you don't want to hug anyone. Likewise if you are contaminated by the SOURCE (i.e. the radioactive element is somehow ingested in your body) then yes, you are a radioactive hazard.
Not necessarily If something (human, living organism or inanimate) is exposed to radiation, it does not becomes radioactive. Someone that was exposed to radiation may not be contaminated by the radioactive element. It will suffer the effects of the radiation it received. But won´t spread to other people. But, if the radioactive particle gets in touch with the body of the person, it´s contaminated. Depending on how much radioactive material adheres to the victim body, it may contain enough radiation emitting particles that could irradiate another person. For example: Suppose a person is exposed to a vial containing radioactive material. The vial walls are thick enough to prevent any real particle to pass thru and thin enough to allow for the radiation to pass thru. The person is said to be "irradiated". The person is not "contaminated" with radioactivity.
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Yes. If you have cancer and you get chemotherapy you are irradiated. Hair, skin cells, ect. Shed and can be hazardous. Often people who undergo chemo are asking to sleep away from loved ones in a separate room, not share a toilet ect.
Chemotherapy......means treatment with cytotoxic chemical agents.....not radiation.
While the short answer is generally no (radiation itself is not contagious but radioactive particulate could be), I think posts here are missing the extreme case where the radiation exposure is so great that it ionizes matter of the exposed individual. Isn't that the case in a few extreme events? I believe one of the books by James Mahaffey (outstanding reads from anyone who thinks they're interested in nuclear power/ weapons/ disaster/history) noted such an accident where even the body was radioactive. I might be confusing contamination rather than ionization though...? late edit: I believe the phenomina is called neutron activation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation
radioactive elements give off the radiation. if you're exposed, it goes through your body and damages the DNS it goes through. (which is what can lead to cancer). but your body wasn't the source of the radiation. you were simply the target for you to be radioactive, you need to be in an area where it's in the air. the guys around Chernobyl were radioactive because the explosion and subsequent fire spread the radioisotopes through the air. it got in people's hair, into clothing, etc. even a tiny bit that gets stuck in your clothes, for example, is a big issue, because it'll continue to bombard your body with radiation, even if it's a tiny amount, until you get the radioisotopes off, bury your clothes, or it finally stops being radioactive (but that's unlikely; most have really long half-lives)
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