Women leading the way in nuclear medicine in UAE

The Middle East is leading in the number of women working in the field of nuclear medicine, according to a survey by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

ABU DHABI // The Middle East is forging ahead in the number of women working in the field of nuclear medicine, a survey by the International Atomic Energy Agency has found.

The report revealed that females made up about half of professionals in the industry, which involves use of radioactive materials to detect diseases.

This was much higher than countries like the United States, where only 22 per cent of medical physicists were women.

“There were interesting results,” said Dr Jania Vassileva, radiation protection specialist at the agency. “In developed countries, medical physicists are underrepresented while, in developing countries, there are more. The highest number was in the Middle East where it was split 50-50 with men.”

Dr Vassileva was speaking at the second day of the 24th Women in Nuclear Annual Global Conference, which took place in the capital on Tuesday.

“It is not an easy area of work and we need medical doctors, radiation technologists and medical physicists,” she said. “We recently established a working group on women in this topic. We have an insufficient number of female physicists, globally only 28 per cent of all of them are women, and this is an important topic for us in the medical area.”

In the UAE, the first medical physicist, radiologist and nuclear medicine specialists were all women.

“International guidelines state that we should not discriminate when we employ individuals in the radiation area,” said Dr Jamila Al Suwaidi, consultant medical physicist in clinical support affairs at the Dubai Hospital and the Dubai Health Authority.

“Many of the UAE’s first radiographers are also female and we work with [international] groups, like the IAEA, in projects to implement educational programmes to encourage individuals to come into this field.”

Dr Seon Young Nam, principal researcher at the Radiation Health Institute in South Korea, said there were less opportunities for women in to work in nuclear medicine in her home country.

“There is only less than 10 per cent of female employees in my company and even less in the case of researchers,” she said. “They don’t know that they can have a role to play so the Korean government is engaged with companies to develop programmes with students to give them opportunities to experience jobs in the radiation industry.”

The country is currently developing augmented reality technology to give students a real-feel experience of working in radiation by next year.

But more needs to be done to rid the public of its concerns about nuclear energy.

“For most people, the word radiation is associated with fear of a nuclear bomb or nuclear disasters like Chernobyl,” Dr Vassileva said. “But many people don’t know that the cumulative dose from Chernobyl for the general population is less than the dose you receive from one X-ray exam.”