‘Preventative’ Mastectomy Found to Not Have any Benefits
Chron
By Todd Ackerman
Breast cancer patients are increasingly having preventive surgery to remove the unaffected breast, but a new study suggests it’s not beneficial for the vast majority of women who undergo it.
Researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center on Thursday reported that an analysis of the records of more than 100,000 patients revealed a survival benefit in 6 percent of those who opted to have a double mastectomy. Most who benefited fit a particular profile that doctors can easily identify at diagnosis.
“It’s important for women to understand that, except for one subset of breast cancer patients, they don’t need to do this,” said Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian, an M.D. Anderson professor of surgical oncology and one of the study’s two lead authors. “Hopefully, it’ll reassure patients wondering if they should.”
The observational study, which was published online Thursday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found a double mastectomy offers a slight but real benefit to patients 50 and younger whose cancer is estrogen receptor negative and in the early stages. The study is the first to find such an association between the procedure and survival.
The study found no benefit among patients 60 or older undergoing a double mastectomy and murky results among those aged 50 to 60.
Women diagnosed with breast cancer are known to have an increased risk of developing breast cancer in the opposite breast. But the study found that preventive surgery on the opposite breast had little survival benefit, save for the one subset, either because patients die from the cancer they already have or from other medical conditions, or because the risk isn’t realized in their lifetime.
Surgeries increasing
The number of double mastectomies has grown dramatically in recent years. Many patients who choose that option say they do so because it gives them peace of mind.
Previous studies have found that the number more than doubled from 1998 to 2003, and Bedrosian said based on her experience the trend has seemingly continued to escalate. Statistics from 2003 show 11 percent of women having a mastectomy opted for one in their disease-free breast as well.
The increase is attributed to scans that can detect smaller, earlier cancers; genetic tests that can warn women of the inherited risk they face; and better plastic surgery techniques that make reconstructive surgery more appealing than it once was.
Bedrosian’s team identified 107,106 women in the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results registry who had a mastectomy to treat Stage I to Stage III breast cancer. Among that group, 8,902 women also had their unaffected breast removed.
At a five-year follow-up, 88.5 percent of those who had the elective mastectomy were alive, compared to 83.7 of those who didn’t.
After controlling for different variables, the M.D. Anderson team found that the younger women with early-stage tumors not fueled by estrogen had a survival benefit of 4.8 percent at five years, meaning for every 100 patients, fewer than five who would have died without the additional surgery were still alive. The prognosis is usually poorer for estrogen receptor-negative patients.
No other group showed a clear benefit.
One expert’s response to the data was to recommend that any woman requesting an elective mastectomy wait a year before having it done.
“In a younger woman with (estrogen receptor)-negative disease, an (elective) mastectomy may be considered,” said Dr. Victor Vogel, national vice president for research at the American Cancer Society. “In the vast majority of women older than 50 with ER-positive disease, prudent waiting is probably the most appropriate.”
Information for patients
One of Bedrosian’s patients was happy to have the data. Diagnosed in December with Stage II estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer, the 33-year-old woman hadn’t thought of a double mastectomy until learning of her particular susceptibility to the disease spreading.
“For me, it was a very matter-of-fact decision,” said Rachel Jackson, an Austin triathlete who has yet to schedule either mastectomy. “I’m planning to live to 70 or 80.”
Nearly 200,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and 40,000 die of it. The majority do not have mastectomies.
Bedrosian emphasized that the study findings should not be interpreted as “a uniform mandate.”
“This is still a decision to be made by the patient after talking with her doctor,” Bedrosian said. “A younger woman with early-stage ER-negative breast cancer might have good reason not to want a (double) mastectomy, and an older woman — say, with a significant family history — might have good reason to want one.”
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Would You Trust A Robot to Perform Surgery on You?
February 26, 2010
ABC News
By Carolyn Thompson
One of the first things Mike Ameroso asked while contemplating robotic surgery for his prostate cancer was how many surgeries his doctors had done with the robot.
He liked the idea of the robot’s smaller incision and steady miniature “hands” and the promise of less pain and a quick recovery — but had his doctors put in time at the controls?
After all, “an aircraft is only as good as the pilot who flies it,” concurred Thenkurussi Kesavadas as he and Ameroso took part Thursday in the rollout of a new robotic surgery simulator that lets surgeons practice endlessly in a field that’s growing by leaps and bounds.
The “RoSS” simulator closely approximates the touch and feel of the widely used da Vinci robotic surgical system. It was developed through a collaboration between the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and University at Buffalo, where Kesavadas heads the Virtual Reality Lab.
Nearly all prostate surgeries in the United States are now performed by robot, with doctors peering through a viewfinder at a magnified image and moving instruments in the air to control the ones inside the patient. Robotic systems are increasingly being used in everything from weight loss surgery to children’s operations.
Ameroso’s successful 2007 surgery made him a believer. The 68-year-old Amherst resident came out of it not only cancer-free but pain-free and with only a half-inch incision.
But “it is never about the machine,” said Dr. Khurshid Guru, a surgeon and director of the Center for Robotic Surgery at Roswell Park in Buffalo. “What’s more important than the machine is the person who manages or operates the machine.”
Guru and Kesavadas co-founded a spin-off company, Simulated Surgical Systems LLC, to commercialize the RoSS simulator and have already taken five orders for the roughly $100,000 machines.
The simulator uses virtual reality technology developed over 10 years at UB to let surgeons practice anything from cutting tissue and sewing incisions to full procedures and versions of procedures where complications arise.
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Double Mastectomy May Not Improve Survival
February 26, 2010
Business Week
By Kathleen Doheny
Women with breast cancer who choose to have a preventive mastectomy on their disease-free breast do reduce their risk of cancer in that breast, studies have shown.
But now new research finds that the survival benefit from that preventive surgery is small and not equal among all women.
“The survival benefit was limited to a small subset of all breast cancer patients [studied],” said study author Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian, an assistant professor of surgical oncology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston.
Those most likely to derive a survival benefit, she said, were those younger than 50 who had been diagnosed with early-stage cancers that were estrogen receptor (ER)-negative.
ER-negative tumors don’t require estrogen to grow, as do ER-positive tumors, and the prognosis is poorer for the ER-negative cancers, according to the American Cancer Society.
The study is published online Feb. 25 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
According to Bedrosian and others, experts have long known that women diagnosed with breast cancer have an elevated risk of developing cancer in the opposite breast. Removing that breast as a preventive measure reduces, but does not eliminate, the risk of cancer in that breast.
“But we have never really established the difference it makes in the survival of breast cancer patients,” she said. So, Bedrosian and her colleagues used data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database, evaluating 107,106 women with breast cancer who had undergone mastectomy for that cancer between 1998 and 2003, along with a subset of 8,902 who had the opposite breast removed as a preventive measure.
After a five-year follow-up, 88.5 percent of those who had the opposite breast surgery were alive, versus 83.7 percent of those who did not, a difference of less than 5 percent. The improved survival was clear for a select group, mostly the women aged 18 to 49 with early-stage, ER-negative tumors, the researchers found.
There was no information from the database on whether the women had genetic mutations to boost breast cancer risk, Bedrosian noted.
After five years, what might happen? “We actually would expect that number [the nearly 5 percent benefit] would increase over time,” Bedrosian said.
The findings makes sense to Dr. Allison W. Kurian, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif., who has published research on the topic.
“These results are consistent with other studies,” she said, including her own research published in 2009 in the same journal, which found that the risk for a breast cancer in the opposite breast is affected by a variety of factors, with those having ER-negative tumors in the original breast cancer having a higher risk of getting second tumors in the opposite breast.
Bedrosian said her research suggests most women diagnosed with breast cancer shouldn’t be concerned about the opposite breast: “We cannot demonstrate for most of them a survival benefit [with preventive mastectomy on the opposite breast].”
However, she said, psychological factors should also be taken into account. “There are some patients who may feel they still want to do this,” she said.
Kurian agreed: “This paper does give more information [about the outlook for various women], but it remains a personal decision for women to discuss with their doctor.”
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Cancer Can Regrow After Radiation/Chemotherapy
February 24, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
Researchers from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have published findings in the journal Cell that explain how tumor cells can re-seed and spread throughout the body after they have been removed through conventional chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation treatments. Tiny tumor cells that circulate throughout the body often begin to send out seeds to the places where the tumor originated, essentially planting the cancer back into the body.
Joan Massague and her colleagues at the Center are finding that conventional treatments leave behind malignant cells that relocate to other areas of the body to avoid being destroyed. Eventually they return as stronger and more aggressive tumors, having gathered back the worst leftover cells from the previous cancer. The result is a second cancer that is worse than the first.
Chemicals present in the immune system also appear to signal tumor cells in circulation to return to their source. Following conventional treatment, the immune system actually works against the body by drawing the vagrant cancer cells back to where they originally seeded, kick starting a relapse.
Medical professionals typically attribute recurrences of cancer following conventional treatment to a few remaining cells that survived treatment and remained at the source. However this study illustrates definitively that lingering cells hide throughout the body and later return to self seed back where they originally started.
What these findings illustrate is that conventional cancer treatments are not effective at eradicating cancer from the body. The targeting of a specific area with surgery, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy cannot successfully remove the cancer from the body because its cells will find another place to live temporarily, only to return even stronger the next time.
Biopsies cause cancer to spread
A conventional biopsy is usually recommended as the best way to identify the presence of cancer, both before and after treatments. Needle biopsies involve taking tissue samples at various places in order to identify the presence of cancer cells. Official diagnosis of cancer cannot take place without a biopsy, resulting in the pressuring of patients to get one if they suspect a tumor.
Many doctors will insist that a person needs a biopsy, but the threat of spreading cancer far outweighs any perceived benefits. Those who receive biopsies will most likely experience unnecessary cancer spread and, following conventional treatment, will probably experience cancer reseeding. Cancer is known to develop at the puncture sites of biopsies.
Chemotherapy leads to reseeding
Chemotherapy treatments involve targeting cancer cells that are rapidly dividing and spreading with harsh chemicals designed to kill them. While treatment may kill the primary tumor, it fails to eradicate the cells that divide more slowly, resulting in a continued replication of cancer cells following treatment.
Many who believe they are in remission following their chemotherapy treatments later discover that their cancer has returned. Not only do they undergo the horrors of the treatment which leaves their body and health in shambles, but they often end up with a more severe version of their original cancer.
Conventional therapies are a failure
Conventional medicine is at a loss for how to deal with the problem of reseeding. Within their paradigm, chemotherapy, radiation, drugs, and surgery are the only options for treating someone with cancer. Now that these are proving to be largely ineffective, scientists are searching for yet another new drug to combat the tendency of cancers to re-seed in order to continue promoting these accepted forms of cancer treatment. They are even investigating the possibility of developing vaccines that will allegedly use the body’s immune system to stop vagrant cancer cells.
The problem with drugs, surgery, and radiation is that they will never be able to systematically rid the body of the problem because they are only capable of targeting a confined area. These methods are also wrought with negative side effects so severe that many people end up dying simply from the treatment.
Conventional treatment is also extremely expensive, heavily burdening an already overwhelmed health care system. It is simply assumed that there are no alternative methods by which cancer can be treated, let alone prevented.
Many recently published studies have found that pomegranates, mangoes, and other natural foods contain valuable phytonutrients that effectively prevent and stop malignant cancer cells while preserving good cells. These nutrients holistically rid the body of harmful cells, targeting them wherever they hide in the body and eliminating them.
Conventional medicine would do best to begin focusing heavily on the compounds found in nature that are designed to deter cancer without inflicting negative side effects as an alternative to the mainstream methods that are only making the problem worse. Whether in aloe vera, peach pits, raw almonds, or the many fruits and vegetables found around the world, anti-cancer nutrients are everywhere and modern medicine is only beginning to recognize them. They may not result in the next big blockbuster drug but they work and they are inexpensive. Perhaps this is the reason they are generally marginalized and looked down upon by the cancer industry.
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Affordable Healthcare in Mexico
February 22, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
As the debate over health care reform remains stalled in Congress, many U.S. residents are taking matters into their own hands by simply driving to Mexico for affordable care and prescriptions.
“I’m very lucky to live near enough to Mexico to get good healthcare at a reasonable price,” said retired police officer Bob Ritz, who lives in Tombstone, Ariz. Although Ritz does have insurance, many of his medical costs are simply not covered, or the co-pays and deductibles are so high that he cannot afford them on his fixed income.
“I pay $400 a month for my health insurance, and it’s still cheaper to come to Mexico,” he said.
In contrast to Ritz, approximately 46 million U.S. residents live without any medical insurance at all.
According to a study by the University of California-Los Angeles’ Center for Health Policy Research, roughly one million people go to Mexico for dental or medical care or prescriptions every year from California alone.
The primary difference between Mexican and U.S. health care is the cost — with many U.S. doctors having trained at Mexican medical schools and vice versa, and similar hygienic standards in place. Responding to the influx of people from the U.S. seeking affordable care, clinics in Mexican border towns now offer everything from regular dental care to cosmetic and weight-loss surgeries or other major procedures like hysterectomies.
In Naco, Mexico, Dr. Sixto de la Pena Cortes charges roughly $20 for a standard checkup. He says he gets about 15 patients from the United States every week. The most common complaints that he treats are “bronchitis, pneumonia and stomach problems,” he said, but he has also treated broken bones. Once, he referred a patient to a hospital for an appendix removal operation that cost $2,000.
“I waste up to four hours coming to an appointment, but it’s worth it as we’ll save thousands of dollars,” said Beatriz Iturriaga of Eastlake, California, who paid $6,500 for bariatric surgery in Tijuana.
A typical bariatric surgery in the United States costs as much as $40,000.
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Heart Transplants Linked to Skin Cancer
February 11, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
A new study published by the Mayo Clinic in the journal Archives of Dermatology has revealed that roughly half of all patients who undergo a heart transplant end up getting skin cancer within 15 years of the surgery. Among the 312 people evaluated in the study, 1,395 different skin cancers emerged following surgery.
Whenever a body part is surgically implanted, the body recognizes it as a foreign object and proceeds to attack it. Patients who undergo organ transplants usually have to take immune suppressant drugs for the rest of their lives in order to prevent the body from rejecting the organ. These drugs increase patients’ risk of developing cancer and other serious diseases.
The Mayo Clinic study evaluated what types of skin cancers emerged following a heart transplant and found that all sorts of skin cancers, from minor to fatal, afflicted patients. While relatively rare, researchers discovered that some patients developed malignant melanomas, the most serious type of skin cancer. One study participant died from malignant melanoma.
A 2005 study published in the journal CANCER revealed that patients who undergo kidney transplants are four times more prone to getting melanoma. As patients age, that risk continues to increase due to the long term immuno-suppressive action of the drugs. Other studies have found that organ transplant patients are at a higher of developing all cancers, not just skin cancer.
Many doctors are encouraging patients who have undergone transplant surgery to perform self evaluations on a regular basis to identify the presence of skin cancer. By finding it early, the majority of skin cancers can be eradicated. Some also recommended that post surgery patients be screened regularly to help catch a developing cancer as early as possible.
Amazingly, some experts believe that the increased cancer risk following surgery highlights the amazing success of contemporary transplant surgery techniques. Their logic concludes that since surgery prolongs a person’s life, those extra years allow additional time for future problems to materialize that would have otherwise been unable to.
While it may seem like a great success to have developed advanced ways of transplanting organs, many may argue that having to take potentially life-threatening drugs in order to keep the organs functioning is actually an ironic failure. Not every transplant patient will end up getting cancer but a great many will live out the rest of their days in poor health due to severe drug side effects.
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Nurse to Stand Trial for Reporting Doctor
February 8, 2010
The New York Times
By Kevin Sack
It occurred to Anne Mitchell as she was writing the letter that she might lose her job, which is why she chose not to sign it. But it was beyond her conception that she would be indicted and threatened with 10 years in prison for doing what she knew a nurse must: inform state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.When she was fingerprinted and photographed at the jail here last June, it felt as if she had entered a parallel universe, albeit one situated in this barren scrap of West Texas oil patch.
“It was surreal,” said Mrs. Mitchell, 52, the wife of an oil field mechanic and mother of a teenage son. “I said how can this be? You can’t go to prison for doing the right thing.”
But in what may be an unprecedented prosecution, Mrs. Mitchell is scheduled to stand trial in state court on Monday for “misuse of official information,” a third-degree felony in Texas.
The prosecutor said he would show that Mrs. Mitchell had a history of making “inflammatory” statements about Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles Jr. and intended to damage his reputation when she reported him last April to the Texas Medical Board, which licenses and disciplines doctors.
Mrs. Mitchell counters that as an administrative nurse, she had a professional obligation to protect patients from what she saw as a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures — including a failed skin graft that Dr. Arafiles performed in the emergency room, without surgical privileges. He also sutured a rubber tip to a patient’s crushed finger for protection, an unconventional remedy that was later flagged as inappropriate by the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Charges against a second nurse, Vickilyn Galle, who helped Mrs. Mitchell write the letter, were dismissed at the prosecutor’s discretion last week.
The case has been infused with the small-town politics of this wind-whipped city of 5,200 in the heart of the Permian Basin, 10 miles from the New Mexico border. The seeming conflicts of interest are as abundant as the cattle grazing among the pump jacks and mesquite.
When the medical board notified Dr. Arafiles of the anonymous complaint, he protested to his friend, the Winkler County sheriff, that he was being harassed. The sheriff, an admiring patient who credits the doctor with saving him after a heart attack, obtained a search warrant to seize the two nurses’ work computers and found the letter.
Both sides acknowledge that the case has polarized the community, and the judge has moved the trial to a neighboring county.
The state and national nurses associations have called the prosecution an outrage and raised $40,000 for the defense. Legal experts argue that in a civil context, Mrs. Mitchell would seem to be protected by Texas whistle-blower laws.
“To me, this is completely over the top,” said Louis A. Clark, president of the Government Accountability Project, a group that promotes the defense of whistle-blowers. “It seems really, really unique.”
Until they were fired without explanation on June 1, Mrs. Mitchell and Mrs. Galle had worked a combined 47 years at Winkler County Memorial Hospital here, most recently as its compliance and quality improvement officers.
The nurses, who are highly regarded even by the administrator who dismissed them, said the case had stained their reputations and drained their savings. With felony charges pending, neither has been able to find work. They said they could feel heads turn when they walked into local lunch spots like El Joey’s Mexican restaurant.
“It has derailed our careers, and we’re probably not going to be able to get them back on track again,” said Mrs. Galle, 54, a grandmother who is depicted around town as the soft-spoken Thelma to Mrs. Mitchell’s straight-shooting Louise. “We’re just in disbelief that you could be arrested for doing something you had been told your whole career was an obligation.”
It was not long after the public hospital hired Dr. Arafiles in 2008 that the nurses said they began to worry. They sounded internal alarms but felt they were not being heeded by administrators.
Frustrated and fearing for patients, they directed the medical board to six cases “of concern” that were identified by file numbers but not by patient names. The letter also mentioned that Dr. Arafiles was sending e-mail messages to patients about an herbal supplement he sold on the side.
Mrs. Mitchell typed the letter and mailed it with a separate complaint signed by a third nurse, who wrote that she had resigned because of similar concerns about Dr. Arafiles. That nurse was not charged.
To convict Mrs. Mitchell, the prosecution must prove that she used her position to disseminate confidential information for a “nongovernmental purpose” with intent to harm Dr. Arafiles.
Mari E. Robinson, executive director of the Texas Medical Board, has warned in a blistering letter to prosecutors that the case will have “a significant chilling effect” on the reporting of malpractice.
The nurses’ lawyers, John H. Cook IV and Brian Carney, have filed a civil lawsuit in federal court charging the county, hospital, sheriff, doctor and prosecutor with vindictive prosecution and denial of the nurses’ First Amendment rights.
Nonetheless, the sheriff, Robert L. Roberts Jr., and the prosecutor, Scott M. Tidwell, express confidence in their case.
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Canadians Having Surgery in U.S. – Raising Questions on Health Care
February 5, 2010
Fox News
By Jessica Ryen Doyle
At the center of controversy is Danny Williams, premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. Williams’ decision to head south across the border for his surgery is drawing fire from defenders of the Canadian health-care system – a favorite example for proponents of a government-run health care in the U.S.
Williams, a millionaire and former lawyer, left Canada on Monday to seek treatment at an unspecified hospital in the U.S. It is not clear what kind of surgery he’ll undergo, though Newfoundland Deputy Premier Kathy Dunderdale said that having the surgery in the province was not an option.
So what about a hospital in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver?
“Virtually all forms of cardiac surgery are looked after in Canada, and I would say extremely well,” Dr. Chris Feindel, a cardiac surgeon at Toronto’s University Health Network told the National Post. “Personally … I would have my cardiac surgery done in Canada, no matter what resources I had at my disposal.”
Feindel was quick to point out that U.S. patients have come to UHN’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre for valve repairs.
Canadian Sen. Wilbert Keon, a retired heart surgeon and professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, told the Toronto Sun that Newfoundland does not have the kind of “post-surgery technical support to allow all advanced complicated procedures to be performed there.”
But, “I can’t imagine anything that couldn’t be done in Canada that is done in America,” he told the newspaper.
“Virtually all” complex heart surgeries could be performed Ottawa’s Heart Institute, as well as medical centers in Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton, Keon told the Sun.
Dr. Marc Siegel, an internist and Fox News contributor disagreed with Feindel and Keon.
“You would not find a U.S. governor going to Canada for surgery,” Siegel said. “We’d be putting our quality of care at risk if we went to a single-payer system like Canada.”
Siegel said if the U.S. does move to a universal health care system, people wanting the “crème de la crème” in medicine would probably have to go elsewhere.
“It is quite possible that the procedure he is getting is so specialized that the top doctors doing it are to be found only in the U.S.,” Siegel said.
There also is the possibility that Williams has private health insurance, which may or may not have been accepted at Canadian hospitals.
“I would expect that he is eligible for all the rest of us would be in terms of our own private insurance or government insurance, and I’m sure there’s anything over and above that, the premier would certainly take care of it himself,” Dunderdale told the Press.
Williams’ recovery is expected to take three to 12 weeks, Dunderdale said.
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The MSG Report
Cocaine Found in Water Supply
Rocket Fuel in Nation’s Drinking Water
World Economic Forum’s Security Chief Found Dead After ‘Suicide’
Doctors Are Addicted To Every Drug Under The Sun
Bill Gates in Vaccine Game
UK Hospitals Tried to Gag Whistleblowers
Man Boob Reduction Surgeries on the Rise
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Authorities Alarmed by Possible Surgically Placed Explosives
February 1st, 2010
WorldNetDaily
By Joseph Farah
LONDON – Agents for Britain’s MI5 intelligence service have discovered that Muslim doctors trained at some of Britain’s leading teaching hospitals have returned to their own countries to fit surgical implants filled with explosives, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaida are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery. The lethal explosives – usually PETN (pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate) – are inserted during the operation inside the plastic shapes. The breast is then sewn up.
Similar surgery has been performed on male suicide bombers. In their cases, the explosives are inserted in the appendix area or in a buttock. Both are parts of the body that diabetics use to inject themselves with their prescribed drugs.
The discovery of these methods was made after the London-educated Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab came close to blowing up an airliner on Christmas Day with explosives he had stuffed inside his underpants.
Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.
Hours after he had failed, GCHQ – Britain’s worldwide eavesdropping “spy in the sky” agency – began to pick up “chatter” emanating from Pakistan and Yemen that alerted MI5 to the creation of the lethal implants.
A hand-picked team was appointed by Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, to investigate the threat. He described it as “one that can circumvent our defense.”
Top surgeons who work in the National Health Service confirmed the feasibility of the explosive implants.
In a report to Evans, one said:
“Properly inserted the implant would be virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines. You would need to subject a suspect to a sophisticated X-ray. Given that the explosive would be inserted in a sealed plastic sachet, and would be a small amount, would make it all the more impossible to spot it with the usual body scanner.”
Explosive experts at Britain’s Porton Down biological and chemical warfare research center told MI5 that a sachet containing as little as five ounces of PETN when activated would blow “a considerable hole” in an airline’s skin which would guarantee it would crash.
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