Radiation found on British jets

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Nov. 30, 2006

THOUSANDS OF PASSENGERS TO BE NOTIFIED
Radiation found on British jets
Investigators seeking link to death of Russian spy from poisoning
TARIQ PANJA
Associated Press

LONDON - Officials found traces of radiation on two British Airways jets, and the airline appealed Wednesday to tens of thousands of passengers who flew to Moscow or other cities to come forward -- the latest twist in the inquiry into the poisoning death of a former Russian spy.

The airline said the "risk to public health is low," adding that it was in the process of contacting tens of thousands of passengers who flew on the jets.

Two planes at London's Heathrow Airport tested positive for traces of radiation and a third jet was taken out of service in Moscow awaiting examination, British Airways said.

The airline said it was contacted by the British government Tuesday night and told to ground the jets and to let investigators looking into the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko test them for radiation.

High doses of polonium-210 -- a rare radioactive element usually made in specialized nuclear facilities -- were found in Litvinenko's body, and traces of radiation have been found at sites in London connected with the inquiry into his death.

It was not immediately clear how radioactive traces got on the British Airways planes. Authorities refused to specify whether the substance detected on the jets was polonium-210.

All three planes had been on the London-Moscow route, British Airways said. In the past three weeks, the planes had also traveled to routes across Europe including Barcelona, Frankfurt and Athens. Around 33,000 passengers had traveled on 221 flights on those planes, said Kate Gay, an airline spokeswoman.

The airline has published the flights affected on its Web site, and advised customers who took the flights to contact a special help line set up by the British Health Ministry.

Litvinenko, a former colonel with Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB, had been a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin before his death from radiation poisoning on Nov. 23. From his deathbed, he blamed Putin for his poisoning. Putin has strongly denied the charge.

Media reports in Britain and Russia on Wednesday said that Litvinenko had been engaged in smuggling nuclear substances out of Russia. London police say they are investigating the case as a "suspicious death."

Charlotte Observer | 11/30/2006 | Radiation found on British jets
 
:jaw: Will the radiation affect other passengers that flew in that same jets ? I am not sure if, I understand completely, because it sure sounds like conspiracy to me.
 
This is not clear about how much it will have
an effect to others ? Scary... :eek:
 
The news article stated that the risk to the public is 'low', although, it stated that it was informing the thousands who did fly these planes that were detected with traces of the radiation...in other words, more likely informing these folks to get checked out by their doctors, etc.,....

It'll be interesting once this investigation progresses and if other developements is revealed, made public later on. ;)





~RR
 
Update:

Posted Dec. 01,
BRITISH OFFICIALS REQUESTED U.S. HELP IN RADIATION CASE

FBI joins poisoning inquiry

Russian ex-official's illness may be linked to Kremlin critic's death
JENNIFER QUINN
Associated Press

LONDON - The FBI is joining the British probe into the poisoning death of a Kremlin critic, the agency said Thursday as investigators found traces of radiation at a dozen sites in Britain and a former Russian prime minister reported symptoms consistent with poisoning.
British authorities requested the involvement of the FBI, agency spokesman Richard Kolko said. FBI experts in weapons of mass destruction will assist with some of the scientific analysis, he said.
There is no suspected link to the U.S. in an investigation that extends to five airliners and locations from London to Moscow. Russian officials said radiation levels were normal on two suspect Russian jets and appealed to British officials for information on how to test Russians who traveled aboard the two British Airways planes on which radiation has so far been detected.
Yegor Gaidar, who served briefly as prime minister in the 1990s under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, vomited and then fainted during a conference in Ireland last Friday, a day after ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning. Doctors treating Gaidar in Moscow believe he was poisoned, said his spokesman, Valery Natarov.
While Litvinenko was a fierce critic of the Kremlin who during his waning hours blamed President Vladimir Putin for his poisoning, Gaidar, one of the leaders of a liberal opposition party, is a figure with little influence in today's Russia whose moderate criticism of the Kremlin has focused on economic issues.
Gaidar's illness has added strands to a growing web of speculation in Russia over the death of Litvinenko and the Oct. 7 killing of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Some critics see the hand of hard-liners in the country's ruling elite, while Kremlin backers have suggested a murder plot by self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky to blacken the government's reputation.
Andrei Lugovoy, another former KGB spy who met with Litvinenko on the day he fell ill, served as Gaidar's bodyguard at one point. But there was no other immediate link with Litvinenko, who was poisoned by a rare radioactive element called polonium-210.
Gaidar's daughter, Maria, said Putin had called her father on the phone to inquire about his health and wish him a smooth recovery.
Gaidar, 50, was feeling better Thursday, according to Natarov. "His condition is stable and improving. Doctors say there is no threat to his life at the moment."
An autopsy on Litvinenko is to be conducted today. Since he became sick a month ago, the story behind the former spy's poisoning has riveted the world with twists and turns like that out of a James Bond film.
The planes were searched because Litvinenko said before he died that a group of Russian contacts who met with him Nov. 1, the day he later fell ill, had traveled to London from Moscow.
Polonium is lethal when swallowed, with the power to destroy the human body's DNA. But because it doesn't penetrate the skin, it is easy to transport -- even across national borders.
Three British Airways jets -- two at London's Heathrow airport and one in Moscow -- were grounded this week. Traces of radiation have been found on the two BA aircraft in London. The Health Protection Agency said passengers on one of the two planes, G-BZHA, had not been put at risk, but officials were still monitoring the possible exposure of passengers on the other, G-BNWX.
Two Russian aircraft were also being investigated. Russian Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Natalia Lukash said the ministry tested two Transaero Boeing-737s on Thursday at the airline's request, and found that radiation levels were within the norm.
The reach of the investigation touched tens of thousands who had been passengers on the three BA jets. Some 33,000 passengers and 3,000 crew and airport personnel had contact with the 221 flights on the three British planes.
About 5,500 passengers flooded hot lines to discuss possible symptoms consistent with radiation poisoning, and a special page set up by British Airways to disclose information had 60,000 hits.
It was unclear how the traces of radiation found their way on board, but Home Secretary John Reid sought to reassure anxious airline passengers who were wondering whether they were at risk.
"It's a very low risk indeed," Reid said.
A dozen sites -- including the planes -- in Britain have showed traces of radioactivity, Reid said.
Were You Affected?
If you live in North or South Carolina and you traveled on one of the aircraft that tested positive for radiation, the Observer would like to talk to you. Please e-mail cmontgomery@charlotteobserver.com or call 704-358-5048.
© 2006 Charlotte Observer and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.charlotte.com
 
Whoa... this is scary.

Of course, this is to be expected. We're all doomed to be exposed to one thing or another. :dunno:
 
[FONT=georgia, times new roman, times, serif] Who poisoned the KGB agent?

[/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Only a state with a highly sophisticated nuclear program could kill a person with a radioactive toxin. [/FONT] By Alex Koppelman
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Dec. 01, 2006 | It's been just a week since the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent and recent vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose murder by radiation poisoning has yet to be solved, but the intrigue surrounding the case becomes ever greater. On Thursday, the FBI announced that it would join the investigation, and British authorities say they've found traces of radioactivity in a dozen sites around London, including five planes, some reportedly used for a Moscow-London route. Additionally, another Putin critic, Russia's former acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar, has fallen mysteriously ill while in Ireland for a conference. As of this writing, no cause for Gaidar's illness had been determined.
Litvinenko's murderer has not been found, but the poison that killed him has: polonium-210, an isotope of polonium, an element first discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie and named for Poland, Marie's native country. Used as part of the trigger in the earliest atomic bombs, including those dropped on Japan, polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance. The alpha particles it emits can be lethal when absorbed into the human body.
Salon spoke with John Large, who spent some 20 years as a research fellow with the British government's Atomic Energy Authority before starting his own firm, Large & Associates, where, among other things, he was responsible for risk analysis during the salvage of the sunken Russian nuclear submarine Kursk. Large told Salon he believes the poisoning of Litvinenko was too sophisticated -- potentially involving radical innovations like nanotechnology -- to be the work of anyone not connected with a state. He also thinks the sushi that has been the focus of public speculation about the case may not have been the means used to kill Litvinenko.
Who could produce this amount of polonium-210?
Polonium, although it does occur naturally, is at the very end of the uranium decay train.
You need a nuclear reactor, you need a radiochemical laboratory that can handle radioactive material, and then you need a clinical laboratory that can cut it into a designer drug. Now, those facilities are simply not available in other than state enterprises. So countries like the United States, the Russian Federation, Britain, France and Israel are the sort of countries that can do this.
So this isn't something that a well-equipped chemistry professor could do.
No. The other point is this: Let's assume it was an assassin. The assassin has to work backwards. He has to know when the victim is going to be available for dosing, and he has to work backwards to know when the material is coming into the country, how it's coming into the country, when it's going to go through the clinical lab. So he has to order this several weeks in advance. The target area in the nuclear reactor has to be booked in advance for that material to be made, and it has to be done very carefully because of the short half-life of polonium. If there's a long delay in this, that means the radioactivity will decay; it will become less and less effective.
So not only could it be produced only by a state enterprise, but it also requires a rather formal sort of way of making it. All those resources have to be put together in advance.
Could you trace this back to some country or to some particular reactor?
This material, polonium-210, is primarily an alpha emitter, but it has about 1 to 2 percent of beta gamma activity in it, usually from contaminants or pollutants. A little bit of decay activity produces beta gamma. So what you have is a spectral signature. That means you can tell when it was put in the reactor to be generated. The first thing you can get from decay, from its strength, is, you can trace back and say, "Ah, OK, this was in a reactor 15 days ago, or 28 days ago."
It is possible to get a signature for the lab that separates [the polonium] from the other radioactive materials that are generated. If you have a signature for that particular lab, then you could identify it. Now, because this would have come from a military type of establishment, it's unlikely that other countries would have a signature of that establishment.
Are the Russians in particular known for producing polonium?
Well, most countries that have an atomic weapons program are. It was a little device, or a trick, used to initiate the earlier series of atomic weapons. It has one or two other uses, but in very small quantities, very specialized. I believe it's on the [Nuclear] Non-Proliferation [Treaty] embargo list.
Why would you use this to poison somebody?
I was very surprised, because it's an alpha emitter, which is a heavy ionizer, but generally it's a difficult one to use if you were to have it ingested in food or something like that. One of the things about human beings is that our gut is designed to protect us from being poisoned. So the gut lining doesn't pass toxins into the blood. This would be seen as a metal, and if you look -- health physicists have what they call gut-transfer factors, and the gut-transfer factor for polonium is quite low. Not a lot of it can get through.
The first challenge, if you're going to administer this as a toxin via the mouth or by liquid -- you've got to somehow cut it chemically with something to make it diffuse into the gut and out of the gut into the bloodstream so you can get it into key organs. The way in which you cause the collapse of this victim is to concentrate the radioactivity in a number of key organs: the kidneys, the liver, and in this case in the bone itself, on the bone surfaces. You then get a lack of red blood cells, and the whole system starts collapsing. Now, to do that as an ingested thing is quite difficult. You'd probably need some sophisticated chemical cut into it.
If you could get it into the respiratory tract, down into the depths of the lungs -- and if the particles are small enough, less than, say, 5 millionths of a meter, 5 microns -- then you can pass it through the lung tissue into the bloodstream, where it can do its evil work. Even then, and I haven't done the sums on this, but I would guess to get a lethal dose, about 5 units of radiation, would take some months.
That's what's so strange about this. First of all, how was it administered? Was it administered through the ingestion pathway or the respiration pathway? The respiration pathway would require some quite sophisticated chemistry, and if it was [administered that way], it seems a bit too effective. So was there some trick, not only a chemical trick but a radiological trick, applied to this?
Almost 30 years ago in London, we had the Bulgarian dissident [Georgi] Markov, who was injected with a ceramic pellet from an umbrella. That was very advanced technology for its day, and I'm beginning to sense that this particular radionuclide might be part of a very advanced designer toxin. It may even involve nanotechnology. But it's certainly caught everyone by surprise here; we were just ill-prepared for this.
Everybody's focusing on the sushi Litvinenko ate, but you're talking about the respiratory tract. Do you think it wasn't in the sushi?
I think it was the respiratory tract. [And] I think if it was via the respiratory tract, it would take a lot longer than the sushi bar, so you'd look for somewhere he'd stayed, perhaps for several hours.
But who knows? The problem is, if it was a well-designed toxin, then it could have gone in anywhere. It could have been an injection.
This is absolutely unique. It's an awkward thing to administer, because, as we've seen, it leaves a trail. If you administer this to anyone, it's not only got a radiological half-life, but it's also got a biological half-life. Put this stuff in the body, and an amount of it will come out in a number of days, and it will continue. Most obviously in the urine, but also in sweat. So your victim will leave a trail.
The initial reports were saying this shouldn't have been detectable.
Oh, no, of course it would be detectable. First of all, the initial reports were wrong in that they assumed it was a pure alpha emitter. Well, it's going to have some beta gamma, so that makes it readily detectible. Secondly, the symptoms he was displaying were that of radiation poisoning: loss of hair, low blood count, et cetera.
In Britain we have something similar to your Homeland Security system. We have something called Resilience. Last year we had an exercise for a radiation dirty bomb attack, and the police took over an area of London and displayed how wonderful they were, with all their different-colored spacesuits and chemical suits, and they had police cadets playing the injured, and of course everything went off absolutely smoothly, the disaster was averted and a nation was saved. Of course, [laughs] come, instead of a terrorist with a dirty bomb, one assassin with some polonium, and the whole system just collapses.
You're saying this exposed problems in the British system. Where do you think the breakdown in the system was? Should they have been detecting the polonium coming into the country?
No, the breakdown was ... as soon as he's referred to University College Hospital, which is a frontline defense hospital, then they should have picked it up there.
In terms of knowing that the thing was in transit: These isotopes are very difficult to track externally. If it was a state-sponsored assembly, then it's more likely the courier would have been very effective, so there wouldn't have been any leaking during the courier stage, when they were transferring it from wherever it was to London, if he was in fact dosed in London. So therefore it means the tracking that's going on at the moment is probably either a victim or somebody who's contaminated by way of.
What they're finding now, these traces of radioactivity on the planes, you can actually pick those traces up and bring a sample back to the lab?
Yeah, you can pick it up with a swipe; you can swab it, or you can tack it onto a tape. It's not difficult. And then you run a spectral counter over it for, let's say, 30 minutes to 100 minutes or however long it takes.
What I should say, by the way, is I'm not at all convinced by all this radiation being detected here, there and everywhere. You have to be very, very careful when you're monitoring for radioactivity; you can jump the gun in many ways. Say, for example, that someone had been in hospital and had a radioactive bromide meal for an X-ray system. Well, for several days or weeks afterward, they're going to be passing traces of that particular dose that they've had. It wouldn't necessarily be polonium, but it would be a radioactive trace. So when you go to an aircraft and suddenly you find some radioactivity in the toilet, that may be completely disconnected. All of these contaminants have to be isolated from inside the aircraft to make sure you're just looking at polonium.
So do you think -- and this is the reason I'm asking about the detectability issues -- someone's trying to send a message here?
Well, who knows? I'm a technician, but I would guess yes, because it's a pretty awful death, as we've seen.
Is it possible, then, that they may have made a mistake and given him more than they'd intended and made it more easily detected?
This is a very publicized death: a painful, prolonged and demeaning death. And it could be a marker being set down for other dissidents. That's if I was to assume that it was a state doing it.
I think the problem we should be concerned with is, OK, here's one that's come up in the U.K., which is a sophisticated, technological country. What happens if someone is in Mexico or Chile? I don't want to be rude to those countries, but what if there was a dissident in -- I don't know -- the Congo. What would happen to somebody targeted like this in a country that hadn't got a nuclear background?
It's very odd, isn't it? Because whoever did this must have known that as soon Litvinenko died, the system would have been onto it like a pack of hounds. The problem is: Did he die too early? Or was he given too high a dose? Something's gone wrong with this, hasn't it? All that trouble to manufacture this toxin, to make a designer thing, to get it into him.
They must have known that as soon as he died in these circumstances, unless they had the time for the trail to go cold, then they were in trouble. I wonder if they were too effective. We'll never know, will we? At this stage, all the indications are that this is becoming politically very, very sensitive, so one assumes that the shutters will come down, and no more meaningful information will come out.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/12/01/large_litvinenko/print.html

[/FONT]
 
I just heard something interesting on the TV news.

The family won't be allowed to cremate Litvinenko's body because of the radioactive toxic waste.
 
Correct me, if I am wrong ... Is Polonium 210 a radiation ?
 
Wonder if there is any cure or prevention for this radiation?
 
In that link it says : ..... " polonium will damage organic tissue easily if polonium is ingested, inhaled, or absorbed "

It can easily inhaled ? That's scary !

masksv1.jpg
 
Last update: December 01, 2006 – 3:53 PM
Wife of poisoned ex-spy has traces of radiation

An Italian security expert who met with a former KGB agent the day the ex-spy fell fatally ill has positive for the same radioactive substance found in Alexander Litvinenko's body, British authorities said Friday.
David Stringer, Associated Press
LONDON — The wife of an ex-KGB agent fatally poisoned in Britain and the Italian security expert he met the day he fell ill both showed traces of the same radioactive substance found in the dead man's body, friends and officials said Friday. The inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko widened with the new positive test results, the evacuation of a hotel in southern England, and the sweep of an Irish hospital that treated a Russian opposition leader for what his aides described as poisoning. In Italy, the government sought to reassure the public there was no danger.
The Italian, Mario Scaramella, was hospitalized in protective police custody after tests confirmed he had been exposed to polonium-210, the rare isotope found in Litvinenko's body before he died Nov. 23. The Italian's father, Amedeo Scaramella, said by telephone, "my son has been poisoned." He said he was too distraught to talk and hung up.
Scaramella was exposed to a much lower level of radiation than Litvinenko, doctors treating him at London's University College Hospital said. He has shown "no symptoms of radiation poisoning," hospital spokesman Keith Paterson said.
Litvinenko's wife, Marina, was also "very slightly contaminated" by the radioactive substance found in her husband's body, the former KGB agent's friend, Alex Goldfarb, told The Associated Press. He said she did not need medical treatment.
Home Secretary John Reid confirmed that a member of Litvinenko's family had tested positive for signs of polonium-210, but he did not name the person. Pat Troop, chief executive of Britain's Health Protection Agency, said the relative faced a "very small" long-term health risk.
Litvinenko died Nov. 23 at a London hospital and pathologists, wearing protective suits and face-covering helmets to guard against radiation, began an autopsy Friday. Results were not expected for several days.
At the Nov. 1 meeting at a sushi restaurant with Litvinenko, Scaramella discussed an e-mail he received from a source naming the killers of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and Kremlin critic who was gunned down Oct. 7 in Moscow. The e-mail reportedly said Scaramella and Litvinenko were also on the hit list.
In a letter released Friday by human rights activists, a former Russian security officer — now jailed — said he had also warned Litvinenko about a government-sponsored death squad that intended to kill him and other Kremlin opponents.
Litvinenko, 43, a Kremlin critic who lived in Britain, died at a London hospital. In a deathbed statement, he blamed President Vladimir Putin for his poisoning — charges the Kremlin rejected as "sheer nonsense."
"Back in 2002, I warned Alexander Litvinenko that they set up a special team to kill him," the former security services officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, wrote in the letter dated Nov. 23 — the day of Litvinenko's death.
The letter was released by rights activists in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, the center of the Ural Mountains province where Trepashkin is serving his four-year sentence. Its authenticity could not immediately be confirmed.
A spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service, the KGB successor agency known by its Russian acronym FSB, refused to comment on Trepashkin's claim.
Trepashkin was arrested in October 2003 and convicted on charges of divulging state secrets while investigating allegations of FSB involvement in apartment bombings that killed about 300 people in Moscow and two other cities in 1999. The government blamed the explosions on Chechen-based rebels, but Litvinenko and other Kremlin critics alleged they were staged as a pretext for launching the current Chechnya war.
The FSB, where both Trepashkin and Litvinenko worked, alleged that Trepashkin had been recruited by British agents to collect compromising materials on the explosions with the aim of discrediting the Russian security agency.
Trepashkin said in his letter that after his arrest authorities put him in a cell contaminated with poisonous chemicals and threatened to kill him.
"Litvinenko and I aren't the last in this chain of victims of persecution," he wrote. "Maybe Litvinenko's death could make you believe in what he was saying."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was ready to answer concrete questions from Britain concerning Litvinenko's death, Russian news agencies reported.
"When the questions are formulated and sent through the existing channels, we will consider them thoroughly," Lavrov was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency. "Now the ball is on the English side, and everything depends on the British investigators."
In Ireland, meanwhile, authorities tested Dublin's James Connolly Memorial Hospital, which treated former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar after he became violently ill during a conference last week — an incident his aides have described as another poisoning.
Irish health officials said tests were carried out to gauge any risks to public health, but said they found no traces of radiation.
Gaidar, 50, who served briefly as prime minister in the 1990s and is one of the leaders of a liberal opposition party, began vomiting and fainted during a conference in Ireland on Nov. 24.
His daughter, Maria, said in Moscow that his life was no longer in danger and he was slowly recovering.
"It seems to me that it's probable that he was poisoned. I think that it could be somehow connected with Litvinenko, I don't know how, but it seems so strangely connected in the time and even geographically connected," she told AP Television News.
Irish police have launched an inquiry into Gaidar's illness, but they said the investigation was routine and should not worry the public. "Tracing the movements of the subject and establishing the facts is the focus" of the investigation, police said.
Traces of radiation have been found at a dozen sites in Britain and five jetliners were being investigated for possible contamination.
A hotel in Sussex, southeastern England, was briefly evacuated Friday as police and health workers carried out tests for polonium-210. The hotel, set in 186 acres of countryside, had been visited by Scaramella after he met with Litvinenko, authorities said. It was later reopened.
"Police said they found nothing of any concern," said Graeme Bateman, the hotel's managing director.
Traces of radiation were found on three British Airways planes that have traveled the Moscow-London route since Nov. 1.
In 1998, Litvinenko publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky. He spent nine months in jail from 1999 on charges of abuse of office but was later acquitted and sought asylum in Britain.
Trepashkin's letter also mentioned official targeting of Berezovsky.
———
AP writers Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow; Sheila Flynn in Dublin, Ireland; Frances d'Emilio in Rome; and Tariq Panja, Katie Fretland and Maria Hegstad in London contributed to this report.

Wife of poisoned ex-spy has traces of radiation
 
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