July 27, 2014

In episode 8, Marti reads an except from a chapter in her upcoming book and shares a potassium rich Thai peanut sauce recipe. Potassium has been known to block the absorption of cesium-137.

Background Info
The substance inside the teletherapy unit in this story was cesium chloride and the active ingredient was cesium-137. Cesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years. It emits two radioactive products: beta particles and gamma rays.

Beta Particles are electrons that travel slowly and can cause skin irritation like a sunburn. Skin cells are able to block beta particles, but if they are ingested (like in the case of little Ledie) they can cause DNA damage and death.

Gamma rays are photons that are highly charged and can penetrate tissues, organs, muscle and bones. It has the ability to cause severe damage. The severity of the damage depends on how much radiation is emitted and how close a person is to the source.

 How it all Started
In 1985, in Goiânia Brazil, a private cancer treatment center was abandoned. The abandoned building had disintegrated into a shambles while a dispute about the property dragged on and on through the courts.
Located inside the building was a teletherapy unit that was purchased back in 1977. The teletherapy unit had a capsule containing cesium-137 inside of it.

 
Ignorance and Greed
On May 4th of 1987, the Director of the Institute of Insurance for Civil Service used police force to stop the owners of the building from removing any objects that were left behind. The owner warned the President of the Institute of Insurance, that he should take responsibility for what happened to the “cesium bomb.”

The owners were concerned that the teletherapy unit had been left behind, but they were physically stopped from removing it. The court posted a security guard in front of the building to protect the equipment inside. In the meantime, the owners of the building wrote several letters to the national nuclear energy agency asking for permission to remove the teletherapy unit from the premises.

On September 13, 1987 the guard that was posted outside the abandoned clinic did not show up for work. Instead he used one of his sick days to go see Herbie Goes Bananas with his family.

However, on that same day, two scrap metal scavengers did show up. Roberto Dos Santos Alves and Wagner Monta Pereira. The pair entered the building which by now was partly demolished and had homeless people living in it. It had three deteriorating exterior walls with large holes in them. The treatment room was being used as a lavatory, but the teletherapy unit was still intact. The teletherapy unit looked like a cross between a huge telescope and a dentist chair.

The scavengers thought they might be able to earn some cash if they sold the teletherapy unit as scrap metal, so they wheeled it off to Alves’ house in a wheelbarrow.

The duo also collected old papers from the abandoned clinic. Later, after passing through the recycling process, it was discovered that the papers had small amounts of cesium chloride on them. They were found in a bundle of papers in a São Paulo paper factory. São Paulo is about 850 km from Goiânia.

When Alves and Pereira got the teletherapy unit home, they started taking it apart. That same night they both began to vomit and experience diarrhea and dizziness. Alves’ left hand began to swell up and he discovered a burn on it about the size and shape of the part of the aperture he had been working on (eventually several of those fingers had to be amputated.) On September 15th, Pereira visited a local clinic where he was diagnosed as having food poisoning and subsequently sent home to rest.

Alves left the teletherapy unit under a mango tree in his backyard. Despite the illness and burns, he continued to work on taking the teletherapy unit apart and eventually he freed the cesium capsule from the protective rotating head inside the unit.