In a tragic incident, a 40-year-old lawyer in Brazil lost his life when his concealed firearm accidentally discharged into his abdomen due to the MRI machine's magnetic field causing the weapon to malfunction.
From Forbes:
On January 16, the lawyer allegedly brought a gun concealed on his waist into the room where his mother was going to undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the Laboratorio Cura in São Paulo, Brazil. The magnetic field generated by the MRI machine then reportedly caused the gun to discharge a shot right into his abdomen, as described by Folha De S.Paulo. This led to major injuries and his being rushed to the São Luiz Morumbi Hospital. But unfortunately, the damage to his body was already so great that the lawyer ended up dying on February 6.
There’s a reason why you’re told to remove all ferromagnetic metal objects before entering a room where an MRI machine is located. The “M” stands for “magnetic” because the large tube-shaped machine can generate a powerful magnetic field, much more powerful than the fields created by the magnets on your refrigerator door. In fact, an MRI scanner can produce a magnetic field that’s 140,000 times the strength of the earth’s magnetic field, according to GE. This magnetic field comes from electrical pulses being sent through the MRI machine’s metal coils. The pulses cause these coils to vibrate, which produces the banging sounds that you typically hear being emitted from an MRI machine. These loud banging sounds are yet another reason why it’s a bad idea to take an MRI scanner into a movie theater.
The “I” in MRI stands for “imaging” because that’s the whole purpose of a medical MRI machine, to generate intricate pictures of your anatomy. These images can then help show how your body is working and what may be going wrong, ranging from torn ligaments to aneurysms to strokes to cancer. The magnetic field is central to how these images are created.
While this is very tragic, one has to wonder why this gentleman was allowed to enter the MRI room before being requested to remove any metal he had on him.
Perhaps he was asked, but unfortunately, we don't have those details and it moreso seems like he forgot about the firearm.
