Nuclear Medicine Technologist Salary in Alabama

Nuclear medicine technologists perform diagnostic testing that employs drugs with possess radioactive properties to produce pictures of tissues in the body. The need for nuclear medicine technologists in Alabama will increase by more than 13 percent from 2008 through 2018, predicts the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations. A sophisticated kind of testing, nuclear medicine testing is not performed at every hospitals, making the demand for technologists highest in Alabama's major cities.

Statewide

• Nuclear medicine technologists in Alabama made an average of $58,560 per year as of May 2009, reports the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Technologists salaries in the state were 14 percent below the U.S. national yearly average, which was $68,450. Alabama ranked as seventh lowest-paying state for technologists in the country. Salaries for techs in Alabama ranged from $42,280 per year or less for the lowest-paid 10th of technologists to $78,270 per year or more for the highest paid 10th.

North Alabama

• The city of Huntsville featured the highest average annual salaries for nuclear medicine technologists in Alabama as of May 2009, reports the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Technologists in the city made an average of $61,990 per year, about 6 percent above the statewide average. Nuclear medical testing services are offered in Huntsville facilities like Huntsville Hospital. In the northeastern rural areas of Alabama, nuclear medicine technologists earned an average of $51,780, about 12 percent below the Alabama average. Counties included in this area of the state include Chalmers, Cherokee, Clay, Cleburne, Coosa, DeKalb, Jackson, Marshall, Randolph, Talladega and Tallapoosa.

Central Alabama

• In Hoover and Birmingham, nuclear medicine technologists received an average of $60,160 per year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The lowest-paid 10 percent of technologists earned $44,360 or less per year, while the highest-paid made $79,710 or more annually. Employers for nuclear medicine technologists in the Birmingham and Hoover area include hospitals like the Birmingham VA Medical Center. Outpatient diagnostic centers also employ technologists to perform nuclear medicine testing, such as St. Vincent's One Nineteen Health and Wellness in Hoover.

Educational Programs

• To become a nuclear medicine technologist, a degree from a program accredited by the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists is necessary. As of February 2011, the ARRT had accredited a nuclear medicine program at only one college in Alabama: the University of Alabama at Birmingham. This program culminates in a Bachelor of Science degree and requires four years of full-time study to complete. In addition to taking classroom based courses in subjects like radiation physics and radiopharmacy, students in the program participate in three clinical internship rotations in medical facilities in the Birmingham area.

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New Respiratory Coronavirus Claims Second Victim

Another person with a severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) caused by a novel coronavirus 2012 has died, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Friday. The second victim, like the first, died in Saudi Arabia.

The announcement follows enhanced surveillance in Saudi Arabia and Qatar that has identified 4 new cases (3 in Saudi Arabia, 1 in Qatar), including the second death, the United Nations health agency reports.

Human coronoviruses are so called because of the crown-like projections on their surfaces. First identified in the 1960s, they are a large family of viruses that cause illnesses in animals and humans.

The illnesses they cause include respiratory infections such as the common cold and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). In 2002, an oubreak of SARS spread from Hong Kong around the world, killing around 800 people.

However, according to information published on the WHO website at the end of September, the new coronavirus is genetically quite distinct from SARS.

The WHO says globally, the total of lab-confirmed cases of novel coronavirus 2012 notified to them is now 6, with 4 of them (including 2 deaths) linked to Saudi Arabia and 2 to Qatar (one reported from the UK and the other from Germany).

Two of the recently confirmed cases in Saudi Arabia are 'epidemiologically linked' and from the same family and household. One person died and the other has since recovered, says the WHO.

Two other family members have also been tested: so far one is negative and the result of the other is not yet available.

According to the UK's Health Protection Agency (HPA), the newly reported case from Qatar, was lab-confirmed by them in November. The patient was initially treated in Qatar in October, but then transferred to Germany, and has now been discharged.

The WHO is now reviewing these new developments to see if there is a need to revise the interim case definition it published at the end of September, and any guidance relating to it.

The UN agency says in the meantime:

'Investigations are ongoing in areas of epidemiology, clinical management, and virology, to look into the likely source of infection, the route of exposure, and the possibility of human-to-human transmission of the virus. Close contacts of the recently confirmed cases are being identified and followed up.'

The international agency says there is a need for more studies to better understand the virus, and encourages all members of the UN to continue their surveillance of severe acute respiratory infections (SARI).

It is likely the virus is present in more than just two countries, says the WHO, and it suggests patients with unexplained pneumonias should be tested for the new coronavirus, even if they have not been travelling to the two affected countries or are otherwise associated with them.

'In addition, any clusters of SARI or SARI in health care workers should be thoroughly investigated regardless of where in the world they occur,' it urges.

More information from the WHO on coronavirus infections.

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Balancing Fats And Astringents In Our Mouths: Why Wine And Tea Pair So Well With A Meal

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Of course a nice glass of wine goes well with a hearty steak, and now researchers who study the way food feels in our mouths think they may understand why that is: The astringent wine and fatty meat are like the yin and yang of the food world, sitting on opposite ends of a sensory spectrum.

The findings, reported in the October 9th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, offer a whole new definition of the balanced meal. They also offer a new way of thinking about our eating habits, both good and bad.

'The mouth is a magnificently sensitive somatosensory organ, arguably the most sensitive in the body,' said Paul Breslin of Rutgers University and the Monell Chemical Senses Center. 'The way foods make our mouths feel has a great deal to do with what foods we choose to eat.'

It might explain the appeal of salad dressings, with their characteristic acids and oils, for example. Think also of the pink folds of ginger on the sides of our sushi plates or the soda with our burgers and fries.

The researchers knew that astringent wines feel rough and dry in our mouths. Fats, on the other hand, are slippery. There was the notion that the two might oppose each other, but it wasn't quite clear how that might really work. After all, the astringents we consume are only weakly astringent.

Breslin, Catherine Peyrot des Gachons, and colleagues now show that weakly astringent brews - in this case containing grape seed extract, a green tea ingredient, and aluminum sulfate - build in perceived astringency with repeated sipping. When paired with dried meat, those astringent beverages indeed counter the slippery sensation that goes with fattiness.

This natural tendency for seeking balance in our mouths might have benefits for maintaining a diversity of foods in our diet, Breslin says.

'The opposition between fatty and astringent sensations allows us to eat fatty foods more easily if we also ingest astringents with them,' he says.

As an aside, Breslin adds, fresh seeds and nuts could have a certain sort of appeal. 'These foods come both with their own fats and astringents in one package, so they may be self-balancing.'

Blocking Neuropathic Pain Before It Starts

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Using tiny spheres filled with an anesthetic derived from a shellfish toxin, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a way to delay the rise of neuropathic pain, a chronic form of pain that arises from flawed signals transmitted by damaged nerves.

The method could potentially allow doctors to stop the cascade of events by which tissue or nerve injuries evolve into neuropathic pain, which affects 3.75 million children and adults in the United States alone.

The researchers, led by Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, of Boston Children's Department of Anesthesia and Robert Langer, ScD, of MIT, reported the results of animal studies online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Neuropathic pain can be long lasting and debilitating. Caused by shingles, nerve trauma, cancer and other conditions, it arises because damaged nerves send unusual signals to the spinal cord and the brain. The constant signaling effectively reprograms the central nervous system to react to any stimulus to the affected area, or even no stimulus at all, by triggering unpleasant sensations ranging from tingling and numbness to shooting, burning pain.

'Currently neuropathic pain is treated with systemic medications, but there has been significant interest in using powerful local anesthetics to block aberrant nerve discharges from the site of injury to prevent the onset of neuropathic pain,' said Kohane. 'Others have tried with varying degrees of success to do this in animal models using a variety of methods, but if applied clinically, those methods would require surgical intervention or could be toxic to tissues. We want to avoid both of those concerns.'

The team's method combines saxitoxin, a powerful local anesthetic, and dexamethasone, which prolongs saxitoxin's effects. The two are packaged in liposomes - lipid spheres about 5.5 micrometers wide, or a bit smaller than a red blood cell - for nontoxic delivery to the site of nerve or tissue damage.

To assess whether the anesthetic-loaded liposomes (called SDLs for saxitoxin dexamethasone liposomes) might work as a potential treatment for neuropathic pain, Kohane and Langer - along with Sahadev Shankarappa, MBBS, MPH, PhD (a fellow in the Kohane lab) and others - attempted to use them to block the development of signs of neuropathy in an animal model of sciatic nerve injury. They found that a single injection of SDLs had a very mild effect, delaying the onset of neuropathic pain by about two days compared to no treatment. Three injections of SDLs at the site of injury over the course of 12 days, however, delayed the onset of pain by about a month.

The signal blockade mounted by the SDLs also appeared to prevent reprogramming of the central nervous system. The team noted that astrocytes in the spine, which help maintain the pain signaling in neuropathic patients, showed no signs of pain-related activation five and 60 days after injury in animals treated with SDLs.

'Ultimately we'd like to develop a way to reversibly block nerve signaling for a month with a single injection without causing additional nerve damage,' Kohane explained. 'For the moment, we're trying to refine our methods so that we can get individual injections to last longer and figure out how to generalize the method to other models of neuropathic pain.

'We also need to see whether it is safe to block nerve activity in this way for this long,' he continued. 'We don't want to inadvertently trade one problem for another. But we think that this approach could be fruitful for preventing and treating what is really a horrible condition.'

Does Reality Blend With Fiction When Making Decisions In Video Games?

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With a moral theme increasingly running through today's popular video games, scientists questioned whether moral decisions made by the players resulted from feelings of guilt, and whether immoral actions, including violence and theft, affected the enjoyment of the game.

There have been several studies analyzing the effects of video games, due to the great controversy these games have created. One study from 2011 indicated that teen aggression is increased by playing violent games.

Some scientists have suggested that how each player perceives characters and events within a game might be an important factor in determining the decisions they need to make for certain actions in a scene.

This study, in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, observed whether ethical decisions are made because the characters are considered as real people to the individual player, and whether these choices are made to avoid a guilty conscious.

In order to identify the impact these decisions have on emotional reactions to the games, 75 volunteers aged 18 to 24 who reported an average of 7.5 hours per week spent on playing video games were asked to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) to measure their different ideas on morality.

Participants played the game Fallout 3 on Xbox 360, and then were asked to fill out another questionnaire, regarding their reactions to the game and the moral choices they made.

The MFQ was able to predict individual differences in decision making. Results showed that most of the subjects thought of the characters as real, and any interactions made with them were interpreted as actual interpersonal interactions, which, in turn, caused them to make ethical choices.

Although behaving antisocially was found to have no effect on enjoyment, it did increase the player's guilt.

Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCIA, Editor-in-Chief of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, from the Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, CA, concluded:

'Although preliminary, these results point to the utility of games as teaching and educational tools, as well as important tools for the assessment of behavior. These findings indicate how real the virtual world can become when one suspends disbelief and immerses oneself in the scenario.'

Previous research has shown that game players bring the virtual world into real life, indicating that teens who play mature-rated risk-glorifying games have a higher risk of becoming reckless drivers.