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Panic in the streets of London....

  • 30-11-2006 2:11pm
    #1
    rozeboosje
    Closed Accounts Posts: 857 ✭✭✭


    ... Panic in the streets of Birmingham.

    And I wonder to myself: Will the UK ever be sane again?...

    shut up Morrissey.

    But seriously.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6159927.stm

    What is wrong with these people? Mr Litvinenko ingested a large quantity of Polonium 210. That would lead to anybody's death. But you have to go out of your way to get someone to eat the stuff.

    Pierre and Marie Curie were exposed to Polonium for YEARS. Pierre died with his brains splattered on the pavement when he absent-mindely stepped in front of a horse drawn carriage. Marie died, not surprisingly, from symptoms almost certainly related to prolonged exposure to massive doses of radiation, due to their lackadaisical attitude toward handling the stuff. And even she lived to a ripe old age (considering what she did to herself).

    And here the Brits are going hysterical about traces, traces of radiation found in planes and buildings. Idiotic.

    Don't get me wrong: the findings are very important. Maybe they might help discover who, exactly, is behind this crime. But fer flip's sake, there are no implications for anybody in the public. Even the guy who administered the poison - and who must have been exposed to the stuff, can rest assured that at the very most his chances of getting some form of cancer in several years' time have been increased by a fraction of a percent.

    If there's one thing that illustrates the idiocy of the UK media it's this whipping up of a frenzy over nothing.


Comments

  • #2
    lostexpectation
    Closed Accounts Posts: 9,082 ✭✭✭lostexpectation


    its spread to ireland now, with ex russian finance minister falling ill, ciaran cuffe has asked for the places he was to be tested, I thought he was being foolish, but I don't know now reading this http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10694-former-soviet-spys-autopsy-poised-to-begin.html

    Adding to the international drama, former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar is currently in a Moscow hospital recovering from a suspected poisoning thought to be connected to the death of Litvinenko, Russian newspapers reported on Thursday.

    Gaidar's daughter Maria said he was in a "satisfactory" condition late on Wednesday but "there was a serious threat to his life" after he fell ill on 24 November in Ireland, where he had been attending a conference. The doctors will make their final diagnosis on Friday, but "a poison unknown to civilian medicine" is deemed the most likely cause of his illness, a hospital spokesman said.


    what is it they are finding on the planes exactly, is it the so called shadow of polonium as they put it?

    ie they not finding any ofthe substance but evidence that it was there

    ionised particles i don't know ?

    why did it take three weeks for them to test this guy in the first place?


  • #3
    rozeboosje
    Closed Accounts Posts: 857 ✭✭✭rozeboosje


    lostexpectation wrote:
    its spread to ireland now, with ex russian finance minister falling ill, ciaran cuffe has asked for the places he was to be tested

    Ciaran Cuffe needs to have his head examined.
    lostexpectation wrote:
    I don't know now reading this http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10694-former-soviet-spys-autopsy-poised-to-begin.html

    Ok. Let's have a closer look:
    New Scientist wrote:
    Adding to the international drama, former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar is currently in a Moscow hospital recovering from a suspected poisoning thought to be connected to the death of Litvinenko, Russian newspapers reported on Thursday.

    Well, if somebody did feed him Polonium too, then certainly he would have reason to be worried. But nobody who has been near him needs to be, though.
    New Scientist wrote:
    New Scientist understands, from sources close to the case, that the examiners will be wearing the “space suits” used to fully protect scientists from toxic exposure

    Certainly. Remember these folks are going to be digging around inside that poor man's corpse. It's about as close you can possibly get to the stuff that has been killing him. Even then, they are probably quite safe but ....
    New Scientist wrote:
    small droplets released, for example, as the autopsy team opens his chest

    Well. Let's see. I trust they didn't waste Polonium. The stuff is expensive. So they gave him enough to be sure to kill him. Let's say that would be enough to kill 10 people. Let's be generous, 100.

    He's already p*ssed half of it out. That should leave enough to kill 50 people in his body.

    Now an average body is, what, 70 kilos? Say 70 liters then? How much would be in a "tiny droplet"? You can paint a page of paper with 1ml of blood. So a tiny droplet is what, a microliter? So 70,000,000 of those would go into his body. But let's say it isn't evenly distributed, so the concentration in blood is 1,000 times as big. No matter how you twist it, in that tiny droplet of blood there wouldn't be more than 1/50,000 of the original amount. Which is enough to kill 50 people as we assumed. So that means you need about 1,000 droplets to accumulate enough to kill one person. And remember that person needs to inhale all of those.

    But don't get me wrong. There is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation. So even in that very worst case scenario the people performing the autopsy would be wise to wear protective clothing. But this is the people doing the autopsy.

    Anybody else who's been close to Mr. Litvinenko or if this guy is another case, him, won't have been anywhere near as exposed as any of these people might potentially be.

    The upshot? Anybody closely involved with this investigation needs to be careful. Anybody else doesn't need to worry about a thing. Calling 30,000 BA passengers is absurd.


  • #4
    lostexpectation
    Closed Accounts Posts: 9,082 ✭✭✭lostexpectation


    rozeboosje wrote:
    Ciaran Cuffe needs to have his head examined.


    The upshot? Anybody closely involved with this investigation needs to be careful. Anybody else doesn't need to worry about a thing. Calling 30,000 BA passengers is absurd.

    http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=4846&&&edition=2&ttl=20061130182511

    here people who were on the planes rang BA who told them to Ring NHS both who told them there was no risk and nothing they could do, which pissed some people off.

    My wife,self, son, daughter-in-law and her mother were on flight BA662 to Larnaca on 13th November. I know that BA are not directly responsible but the paucity of information, and attitudes of BA staff leave something to be desired. Does 'ingested' mean eaten or can it mean breathed in through dust on an aircraft seat. These Boeing 767s are not exactly new!
    We 'phoned BA & NHS for advice. They were not interested in asking for our names or addresses and the only advice they could give us was to 'phone NHS Direct but then said that that site was 'overwhelmed'. It is!
    My daughter in law is 20 weeks pregnant and needs specific advice. Who should her doctor contact?
    (John F Pitt-Pladdy)

    "Practically all of the decays result in the emission of an alpha particle which is difficult to detect directly."

    I remember that it had a half-life of 138
    days, and that it gave off alpha particles, which only have a range of a
    couple of inches in air.

    As I write this, there is fairly significant solar activity going on, so that an air traveller today would get a radiation dose of around 10 millirem from cosmic rays, irrespective of where they sit in the plane.


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