A 61-year-old man died in New York after a metal weight-training chain he was wearing around his neck was pulled into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, according to police and media reports.
Keith McAllister was at the Nassau Open MRI clinic in Westbury, Long Island, on 16 July when the incident occurred. He had accompanied his wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, who was undergoing a scan on her knee. After she called out for his help, the technician allowed him to enter the room while he wore a nearly 20lb (9kg) metal chain used for weight training.
Police said McAllister was sucked into the machine by its potent magnetic force, suffering a medical episode that left him in critical condition. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a day later. His wife recounted that he had suffered several heart attacks and described seeing “the machine snatch him and pull him into the machine”. She said the chain was attached to the machine for almost an hour before it could be removed.
The US Food and Drug Administration warns that MRI machines create a strong static magnetic field that can turn ferrous objects into projectiles. The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering notes that such devices exert powerful forces on magnetisable objects, strong enough to “fling a wheelchair across the room”. This is not the first fatal MRI accident in New York; in 2001, a six-year-old boy died when an oxygen tank was pulled into the scanner.
