The oversight division of a U.S. government agency tasked with ensuring the safe use of radioactive materials issued a recent report that the agency’s advisers had key undisclosed conflicts of interest, raising fresh concerns about controversial decisions around the reporting of radioactive injection accidents.
The report, released on March 26 and conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Office of the Inspector General, identified conflicts of interest involving two members of the Advisory Committee on the Medical Uses of Isotopes (ACUMI), a group of experts that advises the NRC. These members were part of a scientific organization vocally opposed to a proposal NRC was considering around reporting cases of extravasation, which is when radioactive medicine is accidentally injected outside a vein and in other tissues. And they “carried out a campaign” against this proposal, according to the report, at the same time they were helping shape NRC’s thinking on the petition in their role as advisers.
NRC’s inspector general office went further, finding that the agency doesn’t have a policy requiring conflicts of interest reviews, and “therefore, lacks internal controls in this context that could facilitate compliance with federal ethics requirements and help avoid both actual and apparent conflicts of interest.”