THE vitriol directed at both Dounreay and Scottish Minister Brian Wilson (No, we do not trust them, Letters, May 6), goes a giant step too far with the accusation of their spinning ''a yarn about treating the big C''. As someone with almost 30 years' involvement in the northern counties health service, I believe I can assist with the facts on who's spinning what yarns.
It is a fact that ''targets'' are manufactured at Dounreay from highly enriched uranium. Dounreay is the only place in Britain which produces those targets with their isotopes. Since the closure of the Dido and Pluto reactors at Harwell there is no other UK source. Indeed, no fresh HEU is produced in all of Western Europe.
Those Dounreay targets are sent to a reactor at Petten in the Netherlands, a reactor owned by the EU through the European Joint Research Centre and operated by the Dutch energy research foundation, ECN.
A Dutch company called Mallinckrodt Medical BV has facilities at Petten to recover the isotope Molybdenum 99. Mallinckrodt is one of just two companies in Europe - the other is Belgian - which sell and distribute Molybdenum 99.
Molybdenum is the product purchased by our hospitals, and it is the hospitals which re-process it into Technetium 99. T99 is valuable because it has a very short half-life - it goes through the human body within six hours. During the period in the body, it is photographed by X-ray. This is what the clinicians call a diagnostic test, and it is sometimes, of course, the ''big C'' which is revealed in the diagnosis.
Now we can complete the circle.
Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, the main acute service hospital for the entire Highlands, purchases Molybdenum 99 and then processes T99. Raigmore buys the Molybdenum from a Dutch company: yes, the company is Mallinckrodt Medical BV.
Hospitals throughout Europe buy the same material from the same company, and the estimate of five million diagnostic doses is reasonable. But Raigmore surely makes the point.
Your readers can now see clearly just who is spinning yarns. The morality of the yarn spinners is for them and them alone. But I don't want them running my country.
John S Rosie,
3 Thorsdale View,
Thurso.
May 7.
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