Yeah, I get the point and gave up, as it’s clear I’m not going to anything beyond “LOL!1111oneone AARAFAT PEEED ON HIMSELF!!!111oneoneone.” It’s quite funny, you have an independent lab submit its work to a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal, and you still have layman who question the results. Worse till, laymen questioning the results haven’t even looked at the paper, the methodology, or the data. Just a knee-jerk response that the data can’t be true, that it must be a lie, that he wasn’t poisoned, or that the data wasn’t properly controlled for.
There’s a saying “When you hear hoofbeats behind you, it’s likely a horse,” instead you guys are arguing that the hoofbeats could be those of a camel, a cow, a gazelle, or blue Beluga whale gliding through the sea. I ain’t got time for that. You guys run off Occam’s Razor if you want to, but I’m not going to don on a red cape and try to save you. Far as I’m concerned, the mod can lock the thread.
OK, I don’t know how the units compare, but there’s apparently a significant amount of polonium in cigarettes: Puffing on Polonium – New York Times
Regarding “not a smoker:” as always, smoke is smoke, no matter who lit the match. The idea that secondhand smoke is not dangerous – that smoke somehow knows the difference between a smoker and a nonsmoker – is principally propaganda from the smoking industry and its defenders. Were other people in meeting with him smoking? I don’t know.
Are you making a joke? But if you aren’t, let me ask you something, are you good at math? Because I suck, so I need you to double-check my math, k? Good! Thanks! Now, the half-life of polonium 210 is about 138 days, which, to my calculations, means that about twenty (20) half-lives have elapsed. Each half-life represents a decay of half of the material, meaning we should be able to back-calculate an approximate amount of polonium-210 Arafat was exposed to.
Let’s use his used toothbrush which had 21 mBq of radioactivity. Let’s give you the benefit and assume the experiments were carried out today.
Whew! Now, double check that for me! We’ve back calculated the approximate amount of radioactivity on Arafat’s toothbrush to be about 1.5 μCi. Now, according to your cite, each inhaled cigarette is about 0.4 pCi, this is about 4 x 10^-7 μCi. That’s vanishingly small compared to amount Arafat must’ve been exposed to. In fact, if your cite holds, Arafat’s underwear - ten years later - would be 4.9 pCi, much, much higher than the 0.4 pCi per cigarette from your NYT cite.
No, in this case you’re the one going beyond the evidence.
Here’s a passage from the article Shmendrik linked to:
Keep in mind these cautions were written by the same scientists who conducted the testing. So even they’re not claiming the evidence is conclusive. This is hardly the “official” ruling you say it is.
You don’t have to link to the article about the paper because I have the actual paper on my desktop. The authors in the supplementary appendix also wrote:
[QUOTE=Lancet]
The ICRP alimentary tract model and the systemic biokinetic model for polonium revised by Leggett and Eckerman were used to calculate the daily urinary excretion after an acute ingestion of 210Po, as shown in Fig. 2-SM. Regarding the poisoning of Mr Litvinenko by 210Po, Harrison et al.** concluded that 0.1–0.3 GBq or more absorbed into the blood of an adult male is likely to be fatal within 1 month. This range would correspond to an intake of 1–3 GBq or more, assuming 10% absorption to blood**. Considering a poisoning by ingestion of 1 GBq of 210Po, Fig. 2-SM shows that we can expect to find about 500 kBq/day in urinary excretion the first 10 days after intake, about 250 kBq/day between 10 and 20 days and about 150 kBq/day between 20 and 30 days. Assuming that about 2 ml of urine produced the stain in the underwear we tested, one could expect to have 1 kBq in the underwear in October 2004 if it was worn during the first 10 days after intake. This activity of 1 kBq would decay (T1/2 = 138.4 d) to about 1.4 mBq by February 2012. Therefore, taking into account the large uncertainties inherent to this kind of model calculation** it is reasonable to expect an activity in the order of magnitude of 1-10 mBq in February 2012 in a urine stain coming from a person that incorporated 1 GBq in October 2004.**
<snip>
. . . it cannot be ruled out that that the gastrointestinal syndrome would not predominate in a case of ingested 210Po. Indeed, Harrison et al. reported results from a rat study suggesting damage to the gut mucosa as a possible cause of death in a case of 210Po ingestion. Along with this statement, Scott reported that in the event of a 210Po-210 ingestion: “Death occurs via one of the two modes (among several possible modes) with the two lowest thresholds: hematopoietic and gastrointestinal”. Regarding the dose level, Harrison et al. reported that: “It is possible, therefore, that gut doses may have been substantially underestimated by not taking account of retained 210Po”.
<snip>
Finally, it should be mentioned that estimates of lethal activity and organ doses found in the literature addressing the Litvinenko case are based on standard models mainly developed for assessing cancer risk. In case of a lethal intake, high levels of a protracted dose delivered to target organs may significantly modify the metabolism over time (biokinetics).
Consequently, it is not possible to conclude that the clinical features of Mr. Arafat were incompatible with 210Po poisoning.
[/QUOTE]
The Wired article says “They also acknowledge that this doesn’t rule out radiation poisoning; that not all people respond identically and that other symptoms, such as nausea or fatigue, do fit the pattern.”
So yeah, we did.
And speaking as a researcher (one who does not work with radioactivity, I hasten to add), “not possible to conclude that the clinical features of Mr. Arafat are incompatible with 210Po poisoning,” is a very nicely scientific way of saying “we can’t rule it out completely based on his symptoms.” If I thought it was more likely to be so, I wouldn’t have worded it in that fashion.
You are correct that I don’t have the original article. As your link points out, it costs $31.50 to read the report. Which makes me wonder how many people who are making claims about what the article says have actually read it themselves. I suspect many of them have read second-hand reports which are putting their own spin on the evidence.
Yup, not dropping that kind of cash to read an article. (I was going to say that I wouldn’t unless I really cared about the topic, but frankly, I can’t think of anything I’d care that much about, so hey.) So it shouldn’t surprise the OP that people are making decisions not on the actual article but on other analyses, since it’s not actually easily accessible.
This is understandable, but Ferret Herder, as a researcher, shouldn’t you have the Lancet on institutional subscription? I confess, I am able to get the article either through my employer or via my alma mater. Your mileage may vary.
Back up a minute - from the Lancet article posted in the OP:
Meanwhile, the Russians are saying:
Underlining mine.
So his hair and his body don’t show any sign of polonium contamination but stains in (some of) his clothing do? Is that really possible? What that sounds like to me is that it someone planted something in his underpants. (Or more simply - someone screwed up somehow.)
Otherwise - It wouldn’t show up in his urine if doesn’t also show up in body, right?
Unless Arafat’s undies and other personal items were taken by law enforcement upon his hospitalization and kept secure with proper chain of custody until being turned over to testers, there’s ample room for doubt about the significance of the findings (on that basis alone).
That’s not abuse of Occam’s Razor or layman arrogance - it’s common sense.
Speaking as someone who’s authored peer-reviewed medical journal articles and has a good deal of familiarity with how such things are phrased*, that’s standard boilerplate for “we don’t have confirmatory evidence, but neither can we entirely exclude the possibility”.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the poisoning theory.
*Dopers, even if they don’t want to plow through journal articles, would enjoy letters to the editor about them and responses from the author(s). I was reading the Journal of the American Medical Association last night and some writers were taking the original authors to task for alleged omissions and distortions. It’s amazing how many cultured ways there are to say “You’re full of shit”.
The result from the hair is expected. If you remember your freshman biology, hair is made out of individual (dead) cells stacked on top of one another. Since these cells have to go through mitosis, accretion of polonium into hair would take longer than month he was infected. In addition, there’s no data on how polonium interacts with hair follicles, heck, in fact, if it causes the follicle cells to undergo apoptosis, there would be no hair to check (it would fall out).
As for some nefarious force “planting something in his underpants.” Is that really a logical conclusion? Again, I leave you with another “If you hear hoofbeats behind you, it’s probably a horse.”
Honesty
P.S Russians have NO credibility on this issue. They’re the clowns who used polonium 210 on Mr. Litvnenko and tried to cover it up. Did the Arafat’s widow give the Russians a sample? Where’s their paper?
