Considerations in screeneing/measuring children with internal/external contamination.

The National Internal Radiation Assessment Section, which operates the Canadian National Calibration Reference Centre for Bioassay and In Vivo Monitoring, has field deployable equipment for emergency response. A substantial part of this toolkit is a set of portal monitors that can be used to quickly screen people into 'uncontaminated' and 'contaminated'. The former term refers to a person who has <60 kBq (empirical practical detection limit) of activation/fission products and the latter group is contaminated by that amount or more. Previous work has focused on how to process large numbers of people quickly and methodologies have been previously published; however, it was assumed that the group being monitored was composed of healthy adults. When applying these methods to children, a number of shortcomings have been identified.