# It's official: Yasser Arafat's belongings were contaminated with polonium **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 16, 2013, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373 "2013-10-16T03:40:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 15
**Author:** ![Honesty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f04885/32.png) [@Honesty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Honesty)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/281 "2013-12-08T17:01:47Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > **Honesty** , > > You are not going to acknowledge your wee tiny math error are you? I had a long response but I accidentally hit the close button and now the “reopen closed tab” is greyed out on Chrome :mad:. I am not rewriting the whole thing right now, but the _Reader’s Digest_ version is that if you take the initial reading of 1.4 mBq from the Russians and back-calculate to the time of Mr. Arafat’s death (24 half-lives have elapsed since his death), you’d have 5.76 Mbq (or ~5760000 mBq). The CDC says that 15 pCi/L (5.5 mBq) of polonium is the maximum allowed in drinking water. If you take a sheet of paper and draw line, putting 5760000 in the numerator and 5.5 in the dominator, you should get approximately 1 million. Or, in other words, that skull fragment had over a million times more radiation than the maximum allowed in drinking water. This is why that initial reading of 1.4 mBq is high. As I reread my post, this might be confusing so I’ll repost this with the cites and the math later today. - Honesty ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/282 "2013-12-08T17:27:37Z")
That’s really very funny! Thank you for the laugh. Interestingly water within acceptable EPA limits back-calculated to the time of Arafat’s death would, by that technique, have had 155.6 MBq then! ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/283 "2013-12-08T18:05:12Z")
> [@Honesty](#): > > Your math is wrong and so is your understanding. The proper conversion between Bq and mBq is 1Bq = 0.000001 mBq. If 1 Bq equals 0.000001 mBq and acceptable level of polonium (according to your cite) is 0.037 Bq, then that’s 3.7 x 10^-8 mBq. Now, take out a sheet of paper and draw a line, putting 1.4 mBq (skull fragment) in the numerator and 3.7 X 10^-8 mBq (maximum polonium in drinking water) in the denominator. I am at bad at math but see if your answer matches mine in the spoiler box. > > 1.4 / 3.7e-8 = 37 million times more polonium in Mr. Arafat’s skull fragment than the maximum allowed polonium in drinking water. reread what you wrote. You are so wildly wrong it’s hilarious. ---
**Author:** ![Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/aca169/32.png) [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inbred_Mm_domesticus)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/284 "2013-12-08T18:27:37Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > That’s really very funny! Thank you for the laugh. > > Interestingly water within acceptable EPA limits back-calculated to the time of Arafat’s death would, by that technique, have had 155.6 MBq then! Can you explain to me what the problem is? There’s a skull with some high amount of radioactivity in it in 2005. It’s decayed to the level it is at now. Water passes over the land, under the land, soaks into the land, and picks up radioactive elements along the way. The products of their decay are found in the water. There’s an EPA limit on this radioactivity that is as true now as it was in 2005. Assuming **Honesty** is correct, apparently Arafat’s skull had some huge amount of radioactivity in it at the time of his death. Someday it will decay to the level we deem safe for drinking water. By the way, for all of you non-scientists **Honesty** ’s statement about the difference between references, controls, and sample data is spot-on. References calibrate the machine. Now that you know your machine is calibrated, you can remove it as a possible source of error in comparing a control (such as brand new underwear) to a sample (such as Arafat’s soiled underwear). ---
**Author:** ![Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/aca169/32.png) [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inbred_Mm_domesticus)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/285 "2013-12-08T18:34:05Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > Yes, but the Swiss used Hanes briefs as controls and Arafat exclusively wore Jockey boxer shorts. You can’t compare the two. > > I also love how the argument has morphed from “You can’t trust a thing the Russians say” to “The Russians haven’t released a report” to “Where are the Russian appendices? It’s meaningless without the appendices!” :dubious: Is it bothering you that the Swiss researchers put more care into their research than what is coming out of the labs of the Russians and French? It’s a legitimate question to ask why these two groups have not released their full reports with all their data. It’s a standard thing to do. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/286 "2013-12-08T18:50:16Z")
> [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](#): > > Is it bothering you that the Swiss researchers put more care into their research than what is coming out of the labs of the Russians and French? The science-minded among us will note that this is an interpretation at odds with an objective approach to the data and potential confounding factors. > [@](#): > > It’s a legitimate question to ask why these two groups have not released their full reports with all their data. The French report is part of a criminal investigation as has already been explained. The Russian report has already been linked to (along with quibbling about supposedly hidden appendices). ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/287 "2013-12-08T19:10:20Z")
I’ll note that we’ve yet to see any evidence that the Russian and French reports weren’t due to pressure from the Israeli government, the Russian Mafia, or the French Socialist party. ---
**Author:** ![Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/aca169/32.png) [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inbred_Mm_domesticus)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/288 "2013-12-08T19:28:35Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > The science-minded among us will note that this is an interpretation at odds with an objective approach to the data and potential confounding factors. From everything I’ve read here, the Swiss addressed more of the confounding factors than either of the other two studies. Perhaps you can educate me, since I am apparently not science-minded, on the confounding factors the Swiss did not address that the other two reports did. Say something specific. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > I’ll note that we’ve yet to see any evidence that the Russian and French reports weren’t due to pressure from the Israeli government, the Russian Mafia, or the French Socialist party. Who is saying this other than you? ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/289 "2013-12-08T19:54:35Z")
> [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](#): > > Can you explain to me what the problem is? There’s a skull with some high amount of radioactivity in it in 2005. It’s decayed to the level it is at now. … There is your problem. You are starting with a conclusion that you accept as true and creating your evidence from it. What we actually have is a hypothesis that a particular skull had a high amount of radioactivity in 2005. This specific test of that hypothesis was to measure the amount of radiation in the skull at this point in time. If it was not significantly outside the range that would be expected for normal variation, say well under the range that is considered safe for drinking water, then the hypothesis is not supported. That is what they found. That is why everyone, the investigators, the Swiss team with a different belief of what happened, Arafat’s widow and her lawyer, Al Jazeera’s experts, all see the Russian report as showing no support for the hypothesis that Arafat was poisoned by polonium. They have tried to spin that some (skull is not the best source they say) and the Russian data is the set that does not match the other two sets of data. Those are fair arguments which can be discussed here. But it is without question a clearly negative result. What happened that cracked me up so was that **Honesty** made an honest silly mistake, confusing MBq for mBq, and thereby made calculations that were off by a factor of 9. > [@Honesty](#): > > The proper conversion between Bq and mBq is 1Bq = 0.000001 mBq. If 1 Bq equals 0.000001 mBq … No, **Terr** had it right. The proper conversion betwee Bq and mBq is 1 Bq = 1000 mBq. 1 Bq is not 0.000001 mBq, 1 Bq is 1000 mBq. Now many posters here make mistakes. Ones interested in honest debate own up to them when they are pointed out. Some embarrass themselves and amuse others by trying to claim that they had not made one but that we misunderstood what they wrote. The mistake was a reasonably easy one to make. For fans of Big Bang Theory, even Sheldon can make a mistake like that … as Amy in that show said, it just “proves that Americans can’t handle the metric system.” 🙂 The character Sheldon was however embarrassed by the mistake and admitted to it. **Honesty** ’s attempted spin out of it was the funny part. The comment referenced by **Ibn** was that made by **Honesty** at a point that he thought the French data was substantially different than the Swiss data (not different primarily in interpretation but not showing any polonium). When he thought the data showed no polonium then the responses were that we cannot consider it because we do not have the full report but if it does exist then > [@Honesty](#): > > What evidence is there that the scientists were not threatened by Israel or any other country to come up with a negative result? ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/290 "2013-12-08T22:47:49Z")
Something that [puzzles me](http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/12/report-concludes-arafat-was-not-poisoned-polonium-210) and can perhaps be explained by a forum contributor who has a Masters Degree in Science: According to a member of the Swiss team that concluded Arafat was poisoned nearly definitely or at least virtually probably, radon levels in his tomb were 17 times higher in soil contaminated by his body fluids as opposed to soil elsewhere in the tomb, so it couldn’t have been radon that produced their readings. What test is it that confirms biological fluid contamination in soil decades after burial? Elsewere in the linked story it is heartening to see scientific peers raising some of the same doubts about the Swiss report as posters in this thread. \*“‘Mr Arafat’s immunological report was normal and anyone with a significant amount of radiation typically shows a suppressed immunological system,’ says radiochemist Jack Cornett of the University of Ottawa, Canada. Tests should have shown a significant depletion of white blood cells in his body, for example. Cornett praises the Swiss team’s methods but says if you put more weight on clinical evidence this would lead you to conclude that Arafat was not poisoned.” ‘You have two sets of observations which are inconsistent. The grave site and personal possession analysis has excess polonium. I don’t know how to explain the technical observations and, since I am a radiochemist, I believe what they did. They did a lot of careful checks and they are good scientists,’ says Cornett. ‘However, given the preponderance of evidence from cancer patients all over the world,’ he says it seems impossible to die from radiation poisoning without showing any symptoms." “The levels of polonium-210 compared to lead-210 on his personal items stored after his death are anomalous, says Cornett. ‘It is very difficult to explain how you could get this anomaly unless someone had intentionally added polonium-210,’ he adds. There are issues regarding chain of custody with the evidence, he adds, both in terms of the personal effects but also the grave site, so purposeful contamination cannot be ruled out.” “Atie Verschoor, a chemist at the Expertise Centre Environmental Medicine (ECEMed) in the Netherlands, believes the French got it right and she disagrees with the Swiss team’s findings. ‘There was a large variation in radioactivity, sometimes in the same parts of the body,’ she says of the Swiss report. She adds that the passage of time also made it very difficult to conclude Arafat was killed using polonium-210 given that so many half-lives have passed since his death in 2004. She also stresses there was no evidence of hair loss or bone marrow suppression, signs of radiation poisoning, when the 75 year old died.”\* _“Professor Nicholas Priest, who formerly headed the biomedical research unit of the Atomic Energy Authority in Britain, told The Independent that, while poisoning by polonium “cannot be totally ruled out”, the symptoms were very different from those of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006. The professor, a specialist in radiation toxicology, is one the few British scientists to have worked with polonium-210. He was involved in the research over Mr Litvinenko’s death – the only known case of fatal poisoning by the substance. “Key indicators it was not polonium [that killed Arafat] were lack of hair loss in the face, and no damage to his bone marrow, both of which were found extensively in Litvinenko,” Professor Priest said. Photographs show Arafat stepping into a helicopter on the way to France sporting a white beard, while pictures of Litvinenko in hospital reveal an absence of any hair.”_ > **[British expert says it's 'highly unlikely' Arafat was poisoned](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/british-expert-says-it-s-highly-unlikely-arafat-was-poisoned-8929762.html)** > > Symptoms are very different from those of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, says Professor Nicholas Priest ---
**Author:** ![Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/aca169/32.png) [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inbred_Mm_domesticus)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/291 "2013-12-09T00:32:27Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > There is your problem. You are starting with a conclusion that you accept as true and creating your evidence from it. Actually no I didn’t. I contextualized what I said with assuming it was the case. I do admit it wasn’t until the end of my post that I did so. It was confusing. > [@DSeid](#): > > What we actually have is a hypothesis that a particular skull had a high amount of radioactivity in 2005. This specific test of that hypothesis was to measure the amount of radiation in the skull at this point in time. If it was not significantly outside the range that would be expected for normal variation, say well under the range that is considered safe for drinking water, then the hypothesis is not supported. I’m confused. What do EPA guidelines for safe levels of radioactivity have to do with the normal variation in radioactivity from polonium in tombs in Ramallah or soil or whatever? I think the Russian report addressed their interpretation and stated their guidelines for normal variation. I do not remember anything about drinking water in that. They stated their results were inconclusive. ---
**Author:** ![Honesty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f04885/32.png) [@Honesty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Honesty)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/292 "2013-12-09T02:13:41Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > That’s really very funny! Thank you for the laugh. > > Interestingly water within acceptable EPA limits back-calculated to the time of Arafat’s death would, by that technique, have had 155.6 MBq then! [QUOTE=DSeid] What happened that cracked me up so was that Honesty made an honest silly mistake, confusing MBq for mBq, and thereby made calculations that were off by a factor of 9. [/QUOTE] Let me this try again (one more time). Polonium has a half-life of a 138 days and Mr. Arafat died 3,314 days ago or, in other words, approximately 24 half-lives have elapsed since his death. You can use mathematics (this is where I need your help) to back-calculate the original dose when he died on November 11, 2004. Let’s start with the dose that the Russians calculated which is 1.4 mBq of radioactivity of the skull fragment and count our way back in time. 24 1.4 mBq 23 2.8 mBq 22 5.6 mBq 21 11 mBq 20 22 mBq 19 44 mBq 18 88 mBq 17 176 mBq 16 352 mBq 15 704 mBq 14 1408 mBq 13 2816 mBq 12 5632 mBq 11 11264 mBq 10 22528 mBq 09 45056 mBq 08 90112 mBq 07 180224 mBq 06 360448 mBq 05 720896 mBq 04 1.44 Mbq \<— note conversion change 03 2.88 Mbq 02 5.76 Mbq 01 11.5 Mbq This means that the same piece of skull fragment had between 5.76 - 11.5 mBq (or 5760000 -11500000 mBq) of radioactivity at the time of his death. The [CDC says that 15 pCi/L](http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallon/polonium_faqs.pdf) (5.5 mBq) of polonium is the maximum allowed in drinking water. If you take a sheet of paper and draw line, putting 5760000 in the numerator and 5.5 in the dominator, you should get approximately 1 million. Or, in other words, that skull fragment had over a million times more radiation than the maximum allowed in drinking water. This is why that initial reading of 1.4 mBq is high. If you pour a cup of water and it has 15 pCi/L of polonium, it doesn’t mean that 138 days ago, it had 30 pCi/L, and 138 days after that, 60pCi/L, and so on. You can’t back-calculate the amount of polonium in drinking water because water is constantly undergoing phase changes (e.g. evaporation). The concentration of any solute (including polonium) in water is a function of its abundance in the environment. The low amount polonium in drinking water is a testament to the paucity of polonium in the Earth’s crust and atmosphere. - Honesty ---
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/293 "2013-12-09T02:22:22Z")
> [@Honesty](#): > > 05 720896 mBq > 04 1.44 Mbq \<— note conversion change 720,896 mBq is 721 Bq. Doubling it gives you 1.44 kBq, not 1.44 MBq. ---
**Author:** ![Honesty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f04885/32.png) [@Honesty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Honesty)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/294 "2013-12-09T02:24:00Z")
Here’s a[helpful youtube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsmY4ocWSA) video on calculating half-lives! 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Honesty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f04885/32.png) [@Honesty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Honesty)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/295 "2013-12-09T02:32:18Z")
> [@Grumman](#): > > 720,896 mBq is 721 Bq. Doubling it gives you 1.44 kBq, not 1.44 MBq. Thanks, nice catch! See, I told you I suck at math, ok, let’s try this as a revision: 05 720896 mBq 04 1.44 kbq \<— note conversion change 03 2.88 kbq 02 5.76 kbq 01 11.5 kbq This means that the same piece of skull fragment had between 5.76 - 11.5 kBq (or 5760000 -11500000 mBq\*) of radioactivity at the time of his death. It still works out that the skull fragment had \>1 million times more than what’s allowed in water. Looks like the math wasn’t wrong (fingers crossed to Math Gods), just the units were. - Honesty \*11.5 kilobecquerel = 11,500,000 millibecquerels ---
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/296 "2013-12-09T02:42:16Z")
Keep in mind also that carbon dating is only considered accurate to about 10 half-lives. There’s a lot more room for error when you’re taking an incident that happens only once every ten minutes and trying to extrapolate backwards to a point where it happened 10,000 times a second. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/297 "2013-12-09T03:16:43Z")
> [@Honesty](#): > > Let me this try again (one more time). Polonium has a half-life of a 138 days and Mr. Arafat died 3,314 days ago or, in other words, approximately 24 half-lives have elapsed since his death. You can use mathematics (this is where I need your help) to back-calculate the original dose when he died on November 11, 2004. Only if you assume that the only polonium that was in samples was introduced into them 3,314 days ago. Since polonium occurs naturally, for example as a product of decay of radon, that assumption is incorrect. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/298 "2013-12-09T04:34:47Z")
> [@Inbred\_Mm\_domesticus](#): > > Actually no I didn’t. I contextualized what I said with assuming it was the case. I do admit it wasn’t until the end of my post that I did so. It was confusing. > > I’m confused. What do EPA guidelines for safe levels of radioactivity have to do with the normal variation in radioactivity from polonium in tombs in Ramallah or soil or whatever? … I am sorry but I can find no way to say this without it sounding snarky. You really do need to read the threads you participate in. To recap the sequence of posts: **Honesty** claims that the Russian data showed levels that were “very high.” **Malthus** and **Terr** try to explain to him that the Russian investigators and everyone else are correct, that, no they did not show levels that were “very high.” That showed levels not above reasonable background variations and margins of error. **Terr** tries to help him understand by comparing the levels to the levels allowed in drinking water by the EPA, pointing out that drinking water is allowed to have over 20 times (actually over 27 times) as much radiation level. **Honesty** says **Terr** is wrong, and _explicitly_\* confusing mBq for MBq makes a 9 order of magnitude error which he believes shows how radioactive the samples are: “37 million times more polonium in Mr. Arafat’s skull fragment than the maximum allowed polonium in drinking water.” That’s not a claim of what things were nine years ago; that’s a claim (a very incorrect one) of how high they are now. The point was and remains that the levels measured are within range for background variation and margin of error. The measurements are consistent with the hypothesis that no polonium was in the skull in 2004 and therefore provide no support to the hypothesis that there was any in the skull at that time. What the Russian team was saying was that they could pick up a random rock and measure more than they measured in the skull a fair percent of the time. Does that provide evidence that nine years ago that such a rock was millions of times more radioactive? Is that rock “highly radioactive?” The Russian study in no uncertain terms failed to provide any evidence that any excess polonium had been in that skull nine years ago. You can no more back-calculate from the below significant numbers they reported than you can back-calculate from a random rock you pick up or a cup of water from your faucet. Well I can … I can assume that my water supply was contaminated nine years ago and then if that assumption is correct use the non-zero number I measure and back-calculate what the level would have been if the current number represents what is left over. It would be a very very stupid thing to do and the scientists involved in this study, the other team who favor the other hypotheis, the experts all round, even Arafat’s widow and lawyer, are smarter than to that with these numbers. **Honesty** on the other hand believes such is the proper interpretation of this data. Do you **Inbred**? > [@Terr](#): > > Only if you assume that the only polonium that was in samples was introduced into them 3,314 days ago. Since polonium occurs naturally, for example as a product of decay of radon, that assumption is incorrect. Exactly. \*Just to be clear. I am not calling anyone a liar. I am however pointing out the facts that **Honesty** stated explicitly that **Terr** had made a conversion error and that “1Bq = 0.000001 mBq” and thus the amount of radiation in the sample at the time the Russians measured it, of 1.4 mBq, was 37 million times hiher than allowable in drinking water. This was an error on his part of nine orders of magnitude. It happens to us all. His stating subsequently that what he said was actually backcalculating is however a pure and simple untrue statement. The mistake was understandable (albeit made with some hubris and undeserved arrogance). The attempt to cover-up was where he dug himself in deep. There is honest debate. And there is the sort of debate approach being used by **Honesty**. ---
**Author:** ![Honesty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f04885/32.png) [@Honesty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Honesty)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/299 "2013-12-09T04:58:29Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > Only if you assume that the only polonium that was in samples was introduced into them 3,314 days ago. That’s the assumption. Give or take 100 days. > [@Terr](#): > > Since polonium occurs naturally, for example as a product of decay of radon, that assumption is incorrect. It is extraordinarily unlikely that these values were inflated due to environmental polonium. Polonium is so rare that that its abundance in the Earth’s crust is [1 part per 1,000,000,000,000,000.](http://www.chemicool.com/elements/polonium.html) or, basically, non-existent. [QUOTE=DSeid] Just to be clear. I am not calling anyone a liar. I am however pointing out the facts that Honesty stated explicitly that Terr had made a conversion error and that “1Bq = 0.000001 mBq” and thus the amount of radiation in the sample at the time the Russians measured it, of 1.4 mBq, was 37 million times hiher than allowable in drinking water. This was an error on his part of nine orders of magnitude. It happens to us all. His stating subsequently that what he said was actually backcalculating is however a pure and simple untrue statement. The mistake was understandable (albeit made with some hubris and undeserved arrogance). The attempt to cover-up was where he dug himself in deep. There is honest debate. And there is the sort of debate approach being used by Honesty. [/QUOTE] :rolleyes: - Honesty ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373/300 "2013-12-09T05:06:23Z")
> [@Honesty](#): > > That’s the assumption. Give or take 100 days. It’s a wrong assumption. > [@](#): > > It is extraordinarily unlikely that these values were inflated due to environmental polonium. Polonium is so rare that that its abundance in the Earth’s crust is [1 part per 1,000,000,000,000,000.](http://www.chemicool.com/elements/polonium.html) or, basically, non-existent. Of course, we’re not talking about “Earth’s crust” are we? We’re talking about polonium that appears as a result of decay other elements, among them radon and uranium-238. Smokers, for example, have polonium levels in their bodies that are enormous compared to the samples’ levels. Do you think smokers’ polonium comes from someone trying to poison them? Or “Earth’s crust”? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373.md?page=14) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-official-yasser-arafats-belongings-were-contaminated-with-polonium/671373.md?page=16)