oh dear, I fear I am fighting a hopeless battle.

1) There is NO common reaction to MRI contrast agents, including hayfever like symptoms.

2) If you think the money spent on gadolinium contrast agents as a diagnostic tool would be better spent on cancer drugs, can I ask how you think those cancers are diagnosed and more importantly, classified into a histological grade (how aggressive they behave)? A patient with a brain tumour for example would need a combination of drugs which could be chosen from literally hundreds of possible drugs therapies. That choice relies 100% on the accurate description of the exact subtype and grade of that tumour. Without this, the therapy would be pointless. Currently, contrast enhanced MRI is the gold standard (best method) for diagnosing,grading and monitoring tumours non-invasively, even more so with the advent of MRI perfusion imaging.

4) There is no International Agency for NFS (or NSF for that matter). Do you mean the International Centre for NSF Research (two very different types of institution). ICNSFR are a group at Yale or research possible cases of NSF with the aim of identifying potential causes, including the possibility of links between NSF and Gd. They state very clearly that very few cases of NSF have been identified (around 300 out of a population of many hundreds of millions) and that there is still a wide differential of potential causes. They talk clearly about the use of large volumes of contrast agent being a risk factor, which are simply not used in this country. They talk about contrast enhanced MR angiography (which does use higher volumes) which is not routinely used as first line of investigation in this country. We use more non-contrast enhanced MRA sequences or CTA. Also, American healthcare is very different to our own. My own experience has shown me that the private healthcare system over there results in patients having scans more often that patients would do in this country, again contributing to higher volumes of contrast. You should be very careful about drawing conclusions from research which is a) still ongoing b) has very low cohort sizes and c) is centred in a different location to the UK.

Furthermore, a quick google search has allowed me to identify at least [/u]three researchers at Yale University Biomedical Engineering Centre who are involved in the development of paramagnetic contrast agents.