Ignore that man behind the arras (Vlad the Irradiator):
Radiation found after spy’s death
Police probing the death of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko have found above normal levels of radiation at three locations.
Mr Litvinenko’s death has been linked to the presence of a “major dose” of radioactive polonium-210 in his body.Scotland Yard confirmed traces were also found at his home, a sushi bar and a hotel, but the risk to others was said by health experts to be very low.
Polonium-210 has been a preferred poison of the Russian mafia for generations. Not.
Why Polonium-210?
The half-life of this alpha source is 138.4 days. Also, because it implicates those damend Poles.
Professor Dudley Goodhead, Medical Research Council Radiation and Genome Stability Unit, said: “To poison someone much larger amounts are required and this would have to be man-made, perhaps from particle accelerator or a nuclear reactor.”
UPDATE: reaching from beyond the grave, kinda like Fortinbras
Poisoned Spy Blames Putin for His Death
I thought Bush looked into Putin’s soul and claimed he was a good man? Apparently not. Putin is having all his critics killed. This is just the latest one….on foreign soil no less.
Your wry wit is occasionally unfathomable.
Per your link the likelihood polonium was used,
rather than ricin (KGB poison of choice) is rather low. Perhaps a slap at the BBC?
Well, that’s the interesting part about it, don’t you think? The KGB does prefer ricin, but that would have been a fingerprint in and of itself. On the other hand, claiming that the mafia would think to utilize polonium-210, and have access to it, without government collusion seems unlikely. Radiation poisoning would probably be more consistent with the effects of thalium. The fact that Scotland Yard has gone out on a limb prior to an autopsy to indicate that they have detected this particular isotope is telling, I think.
Errr, Dan…
Plutonium and polonium are two very different elements.
Now, on to the meat and potatoes. What the Beeb article doesn’t mention is that even if he ingested a goodly chunk of this stuff, it’d likely not be the alpha activity per se that did him dirty but rather the fact that polonium sits right below selenium and telurium in the periodic table and probably poisoned him in much the same way as those two elements would have. Thus the early mistake in believing he’d been poisoned using thallium since that too is an insidious toxin and also is a metallic poison. The radioactivity part of the equation’s just a bonus on top of things as far as the scare factor goes.
It would be kind of a neat trick to get a hold of enough Po-210 for this stunt although the old “Dust Off” anti-static guns you used on your old LPs before tossing them on your turntable had some in there as the active ingredient.
Polonius!
Thank heaven for the knowledge of those frequenting this realm! For a moment I thought Jim Beam had done me in, and I’d have to forswear him, choosing rather to mine own self to be true.
The old USSR commomly used poison as a diplomat tool. Even Lenin used it against his enemies, and as he was dying of syphilis begged Stalin to send him poison to relieve his suffering (Stalin refused).
Isotopary, my dear Watson. Or should I say, curieous?
Whatever chemical effects Polonium might have as a heavy metal, it is 5,000 times more potent than Radium in radioactivity. And plenty of people have died from Radium.
I reckon that enough Po210 to poison you chemically would light you up like a neon sign, and cause detectable internal burns.
Then why am I seeing reports that the lethal dose is incredibly small? From Captain’s Quarters
oldgeezer: Polonius
That’s what I was thinking: Ho, a rat! Dead for a ducat!
Yeah, but many of those people who died from radium exposure did it over decades of handling the stuff. Mme. Curie spent *years* upon *years* directly handling it trying to separate it from the root pitchblende. Even back in the days when folks were foolishly drinking radium waters, it still took time although the results were pretty gruesome.
OTOH and on the flip side, the Captain has a nasty habit of posting full-blown hyperbole when he gets hot about a subject and doesn’t bother to source it or provide some degree of proof before leaping off the bridge. Since the LD50 for HCN for a 10-60 minute kill time is about 120 mg, his figure would mean the LD50 for polonium poisoning would be an absurdly small 5 picograms. Or as we in the scientific trades would normally put it, utter crap.
To tie it together and take the larger view, given the behavior of polonium with respect to its position in the periodic table (same period as selenium and tellurium, both substantially toxic at more than microgram levels), it’s quite likely the toxicity effects got Litvinenko rather than the dose effects. We see this in work with certain transuranics on subsurface microbes as well. And as some of us have posited on other threads, a bonus trick to this method is that if they hadn’t caught it fairly quickly by bioassay, the polonium would have quickly decayed away to lead-206, removing the traces of the killing agent. The Russians may be hamfists, like when the metal pellet they put the ricin in didn’t quite dissolve fast enough to completely hide the hit by the Bulgarians, but they can turn some interesting tricks on occasion.
Being a chemist, and I can assure you that the toxicity of Polonium is not due to its radioactivity. Generally only gamma emitters are harmful to human tissue. Alpha particles can’t even penetrate skin. Chemists in academia work with depleted uranium all the time, which is also an alpha emitter like Polonium-210… in fact in Texas less than 5kg of depleted uranium is not considered “radioactive” and can be purchased by academic labs. Polonium is a toxic heavy metal, as previous posters have pointed out. Its LD50 (the amount needed to have a 50% chance of killing a rat) is 6-9 nanograms per kg. In order to kill a 100 kg person, that means you only need 0.0000006-0.0000009 grams of material. You couldn’t even see that amount of material with the naked eye. Your body has many metals that are need to carryout every day biological functions and heavy metals are capable of substituting for them or binding to, for example, your enzymes. The results are disastrous.
ABA and Joseph,
Thanks for the insights (and corrections). I wonder whether either or both of you would keep us apprised of where this likely leads us, as other facts are added to the mix.