Five year old Joke Haanschoten swallowed a piece of a radioactive needle, that was used to treat her infected adenoids that threatened to block a Eustachian tube.

“Mortal danger: forbidden to set foot here,” read the police signs around the Haanschoten family’s modest little house in the Netherlands town of Putten (pop. 12,000), south of the Zuider Zee. To enforce the order, barbed wire was strung around three sides of the house and its yard, and…