CT State Police Detects Radioactivity in Vehicles on the Road

Connecticut State Troopers apparently have the capability to detect a human who has been injected with cardiac stress test radioisotopes as they are driving down the street in their car.  This indicates that they have some fairly sensitive detectors in the patrol cars.

This would seem to be useful if authorities were monitoring people working on a 'dirty bomb' type device.  This type of weapon might emit gamma-rays of sufficient energy and intensity that detection would not be all that difficult.

If the device was a fission type of device containing enriched uranium or plutonium, then this device would be difficult to detect due to low energy gamma-rays.

Note that injections of medical radioisotopes typically contain a significant amount of radioactivity.  Not immediately life-threatening, but enough for doctors to warn a patient to stay away from young children.

I had a stress test about 10 years ago and my pocket dosimeter registered about 100 mrem in the first 24 hours.  It took about three weeks for the decay and biological half-life to get me back to background levels.  That 100 mrem is about 500 times lower than the amount of acute gamma-ray exposure need to alter blood chemistry, just for perspective.