This Newsletter "European Research in Radiological Sciences" focuses on whether and which training programmes are needed in radiation sciences at the European level and whether and how EULEP and EURADOS can act as promoters or catalysts of efforts for optimising such programmes. This topic will acquire even more relevance when the European Union will enlarge during the next 10 years. The ten "accession countries", as well as other neighbouring countries, will strengthen their close working relations with the EU and will receive support for many purposes including research and training.

Radiation sciences have played a leading role towards the basic understanding of the physiology and pathophysiology of the mammalian organism. Many advances in biological and medical knowledge originated from the use of ionising radiation at high or low doses to determine the perturbations inflicted by radiation on the steady state situation of organ systems after acute or chronic low-level radiation exposure. Radioactive isotopes played a major role in cell biology research as well as in diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

These developments through the years have been the motivation to establish health physics as a scientific branch within universities and research institutes leading to strict radiation protection rules and to the safe use of nuclear technology to promote energy generation. In medicine, the use of ionising radiation has resulted in the development of diagnostic and therapeutic radiology as well as nuclear medicine. However, radiation emergency situations have occurred despite the preventive measures and prompted the development of radiation medical emergency assistance schemes.

In principle, any industrialised country should be able to recruit enough manpower to deal with such a situation. Thus, the teaching of radiation sciences is indispensable. This applies to the undergraduate, graduate, and particularly the postgraduate training levels. It is also necessary to recognise that there is a need for continuing education at all levels. Such training at the different levels of education is essential not only in the traditional areas of radiological sciences, health physics (radiation protection) and medicine. The observation of radiation emergencies indicates that accidents in well-established and well-controlled nuclear facilities are rare and Chernobyl certainly has been and will be an exception. However, smaller radiation accidents are likely to occur more frequently. We experienced across Europe a relatively high frequency of near accidents that have not resulted in severe consequences. However, in the last 10-15 years an alarming number of radiation accidents have occurred when untrained persons entered in contact with materials with high levels of radioactivity (e.g., in Estonia, Turkey, Brazil, China, Algeria, Peru, etc.). Some of such "small" but significant radiation accidents could even be tied to criminal actions (for instance, the potentiality of dirty bombs).

Despite all this, the number of experts who are really familiar with the effects of ionising radiation, their development and their detection and treatment are increasingly scarce. Radiation sciences do not have a prominent place in training programmes at the universities. Therefore, organisations, such as the European Late Effects Project Group, can attain a decisive role in developing and offering training programmes to professionals who need additional skills and information in radiation science for their area of professional competence.

What type of knowledge and what scientific training is needed? First of all, there has to be a basic programme in radiation sciences dealing with radiation biology and radiation physics, including dosimetry aspects. Such a "training module" should offer the necessary knowledge and information in a standardised way. This means that all training activities, either for scientific radiation protection or medical purposes, should continue to use an identical nomenclature and a regularly updated basic information scheme.

The diversification comes when training programmes are needed in special health physics areas, such as radiation protection, industrial use of ionising radiation, medical use of ionising radiation for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes or for handling radiation emergencies by non-radiological medical disciplines, such as emergency medicine, internal medicine, dermatology, etc. A very important group of persons who need information on the state-of-the-art in radiological sciences are politicians and administrators. It is alarming to see how little administrative officers, civil servants and politicians know about the potential and the limitations of the use of ionising energy in industry and medicine. For all these groups special courses have to be designed and developed.

Due to the fact that this level of training is no longer available in most of the European universities, one has to consider the development of an "Academy", possibly within the EULEP and EURADOS Groups, that would deal with the development of a broad spectrum of training modules in radiation sciences. In my opinion, thanks to decades of professional activities, EULEP and EURADOS have the required scientific potential and training experience to develop a highly-qualified proposal. This would indeed be a great challenge, but it would be successful if appropriately funded by the European Communities.

Under these circumstances, it is suggested to establish as soon as possible a joint EULEP/EURADOS task group to examine possibilities and limitations for the formation of a European Academy in Radiation Science Training. EULEP and EURADOS should take the scientific responsibility, and ensure quality control over courses offered by such an Academy.

It would be important to structure the training needs and to develop modules that would fit a sound continuing education need. The modules may be quite different whether they are for biological and medical sciences, for health physics and radiation protection, for preclinical and clinical medicine, for general curative medicine (radiation emergency handling) and for politicians and administrators. However, these specific modules should all be based on one basic training scheme in radiation biology and medicine. They should fit together so that interested persons would be able to use one, two or several modules as they go along in their professional life.

Newsletter editor
doerr@rcs.urz.tu-dresden.de