Medpedia

You probably don’t give it much thought. It’s your kid’s birthday and you need to make the place look a little more festive. So you pop down to the party supply store and pick a few helium balloons in various colors. Maybe one with a cartoon character wishing your whatever-year-old a happy whatever birthday. Get home and tie those floating orbs to the mailbox or some chairs to delight the party guests. At the end of the event, perhaps a rousing game of balloon ball or an Alvin and the Chipmunks impression.

But helium, you may not realize, is not an easily renewable resource. Sure, it is the second most common element but it cannot be artificially produced. It is collected from under the Earth and the supply in the US, the world’s largest, is set to be fully depleted in less than 10 years. The worldwide supply is set to run out in 20 to 30 years.

So what, right? So we use different balloons for the next party. Big deal. Well, you probably never thought that those party decorations may be a direct threat to the future of science and medicine. MRI’s depend on helium to supercool the superconductive magnets used in that diagnostic process. It is also used in generating radioactive isotopes for nuclear medicine. And in the manufacture of optical fibers. And in making LCD screens. And in particle accelerators. And in NASA’s rockets.

As a result of Cold War strategic planning, the US Congress actually passed laws that push the selling out of our helium reserves by Jan 1, 2015. This was done to recover funds spent in the 1920′s for helium exploration. In order to do so, the pricing of helium has been set ridiculously low. In fact, if helium were to be priced according to its actual value and the cost of extracting it, estimates show an average helium balloon should cost about $100.

This is an obscure problem at best but one that will have far reaching effects in science and health care. And once the US reserves are depleted, you can bet the costs for MRI’s and other aspects of health care will rise sharply to meet the expense of importing this rare element from the much smaller areas in Russia, Qatar and Algeria.