Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with pure TCDD, one of the most toxic chemicals, the scientist analyzing his blood said.
The tests, confirmed by three separate labs in the Netherlands and Germany, also confirmed that Yushchenko's blood contained 100,000 units of the poison, the second highest concentration ever recorded.
Doctors had announced last weekend that Yushchenko was poisoned with a dioxin chemical, but lead investigator Abraham Brouwer told reporters on Friday that his team has now zoned in on TCDD, the most hazardous of all the dioxins.
There are hundreds of dioxins and they are usually produced inadvertently during manufacturing processes that use chlorine, such as those for herbicides, paper and pulp bleaching. Waste incinerators also produce dioxins.
TCDD was an element in Agent Orange, a herbicide sprayed by US troops during the Vietnam War to clear dense vegetation and expose their enemy. The herbicide became infamous after being linked to myriad health problems in US veterans and local villagers.
The poison, chemically known as tetrachlorodibenzoparadioxin, usually occurs mixed with other dioxins produced by the same processes.
However, the investigation led by Brouwer at BioDetection Systems in Amsterdam found Yushchenko was poisoned with pure TCDD, not a mixture.
"That excludes a huge number of sources," said dioxin expert Dr. Arnold Schecter, a professor of environmental Sciences at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas who was not involved with the investigation.
"If it's pure TCDD that means it could only be labs that buy or sell TCDD [for research purposes], government biological or chemical weapons units or a clever chemist," Schecter said..
Brouwer said he agreed that the search for the source of the poison can now be focused on those three possibilities.
Most people living in Europe and North America have some level of several dioxins or dioxin-like poisons in their bodies, experts say. The pattern and concentration of those gives clues to the source, whether chiefly from an incinerator, factory or other location.
Brouwer, also a professor of environmental toxicology at the Free University in Amsterdam, said all of the other dioxins found in Yushchenko's blood were at levels normally found in people from his region.
None were elevated, except for TCDD, which means that even if the poison originally came from a factory or incinerator it must have been purified in a lab afterward.
TCDD is synthesized by labs in Europe, Russia and the United States for use as a benchmark sample in lab tests measuring dioxin levels.
Several labs around the world may also purify TCDD for research purposes. It is not used in any commercial products.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS