10 highlights
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The Goiânia incident was one of the worst radiological incidents in history. The official report of the IAEA from 1988 reads like a thriller
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In September 1987, a Brazilian found a capsule that glowed blue among the contents of the scrapyard that he owned. With a friend, he pried it open with a screwdriver and found glowing blue rice-like grains.
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Soon, many people who touched the grains went to hospitals with diarrhea, vomiting, high-fever, abdominal pain, and hair loss.
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The physicist approached a federal office and borrowed a radiation scintillation detection-kit. The counter went off the charts when he was about 80 meters from the capsule. He suspected it was broken. He asked for a second counter and got the same result. By now, the truth was dawning.
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At the same time the physicist was making his horrific discovery, he noticed that a fireman was carrying the capsule out. He asked the fireman, “what are you doing?” The firefighter replied nonchalantly, “I’m going to throw it in the river.”
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Two years before the mishap, a private radiotherapy institute in Goiânia, Brazil moved, leaving a radiation therapy unit on abandoned premises. Taking advantage of the absence of the guard (assigned to protect it) two crooks entered and stole the machine in 1987, not knowing what it was.
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There is already evidence that diseases that have typically afflicted the equatorial belt are spreading up into higher latitudes.
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Will the next killer disease originate in the Arctic?
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Most people don’t know this. But the H1N1 virus that caused the Spanish Flu pandemic was extracted from the corpse of an Alaskan woman and used to recreate the virus in 2005. That virus was not viable, but viruses and bacteria can remain in ice for an awfully long time.
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Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 40% of wild white-tailed deer sampled from four U.S. states.