AP: Yushchenko Has Historic Dioxin Level

[Florida_Geek]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Yushchenko-Poison.html?oref=login

December 15, 2004
AP: Yushchenko Has Historic Dioxin Level
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:56 a.m. ET

LONDON (AP) -- New tests reveal the level of dioxin in the blood of Ukrainian presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko is more than 6,000 times higher than normal, according to the expert analyzing the samples.

The concentration, about 100,000 units per gram of blood fat, is the second highest ever recorded in human history, said Abraham Brouwer, professor of environmental toxicology at the Free University in Amsterdam, where blood samples taken last weekend in Vienna were sent for analysis.

A normal level of dioxin is between 15 and 45 units. Almost everyone has some level of dioxins because the toxic chemical is widespread in the environment -- mainly from its industrial usages -- and accumulates in the food chain.

..more at AP

[bleedingheart]

1. how can they get it out of him???

[burythehatchet]

4. from what I heard

the body does it gradually...in his case it may take 10 years or more...if he survives that long :eyes:

[bleedingheart]

5. holy cow...that is just horrible.

[wicket]

7. And his face will probably never be the same

The people who did this are real sick fucks.

[burythehatchet]

9. its typical M.O. for the Soviet holdovers

[Pirate Smile]

8. Just imagine what it must have been right when it happened. It has been

quite a few months since they poisoned him.

[wildflower]

31. Could they do a blood transfusion? n/t

[Pachamama]

2. How soon before major cancer appears?

His health is going to be hell...this is so awful...

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. He must be one tough

son of a gun.

[Justitia]

6. ha! I had the same thought - "That is one tough SOB"

Best wishes to him and his family for a full and speedy recovery.
Surviving will be his best revenge.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

15. he is married to an american...think that pissed some KGBers off

[LisaL]

Well, I would think KGB has better poison than dioxin.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

24. nah Risin is too well known now..it use to be their poison of choice

[BiggJawn]

36. Yeah, this doesn't "smell" like KGB.

They used to be quick and to-the-point. Ricin pellet fired into you, Cyanide "gun" popped-off in your face...

This is clumsy, like taking a off-balance friend of the family and telling him the President wants to fuck Jodi Foster....

[leftchick]

27. no shit!

he should be a dead man! :wow:

[HereSince1628]

10. BTW Raimondo says its a hoax

A lot of people at DU visit Antiwar.com, which I can never peg accurately...it has both Libertarian & Buchananite-conservative editorials.

So I've given the caveat about the site's bias...

The Yushchenko 'Poison Plot' Fraud He's poisoning Ukrainian politics with lies
by Justin Raimondo

<Snip>
I knew there was something fishy about the whole "Yushchenko-was-poisoned-by-the-bad-guys" narrative, even as I blindly accepted the pronouncement of Dr. Michael Zimpfer, of the Rudolfinerhaus clinic in Vienna, that tests had "proved" the poisoning hypothesis, and he now considers the "case closed." To begin with, dioxin as a tool of would-be assassins just doesn't make a whole lot of sense: the victim would take far too long to die, and, besides that, not a single case of death-by-dioxin poisoning has ever been recorded. Another suspicious adjunct to this story: Yushchenko declared that he wants to delay the investigation into who poisoned him until after the December 26 election. The ostensible reason for this is Yushchenko's high-mindedness, expressed with the requisite statesman-like gravitas:

"I don't want this factor to influence the election in some way – either as a plus or a minus. This question will require a great deal of time and serious investigation. Let us do it after the election – today is not the moment."

How noble! And, as it turns out, how utterly phony….

<snip>
more...

[JPZenger]

11. After Meeting With Intelligence Chief

He apparently noticed the symptoms right after he met with the Chief of Ukraine's Intelligence agency.

[Kagemusha]

21. Well, flaw: Dioxin symptoms take time to show.

So either he had such an extreme amount the symptoms came sooner or... well, who knows.

I mean, nothing's saying the chief wasn't uh... checking up on the man. To see how his health (or lack thereof) was first-hand. But that would've required poisoning some time earlier.

[Kagemusha]

20. Look, he's making a simple fallacy.

Assassination is a field where a lot of the things you're trying aren't inherently reliable if you're trying to have any deniability at all. There are a lot of stupid options and very little oversight for obvious reasons (like avoiding blame later). Dumb thing can and do happen. If dioxin is a poor choice of poison after the fact, maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time. That doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't ordered in Moscow.

It may mean that there was excessive reliance on locals or something, but the fact is, we can't know, we won't know.

I doubt the doctors would lie, so that leaves the possibility that the guy poisoned himself to make himself a martyr. Weirder things have happened... but there's no proof for that, either. If any wild story is as likely as any other, a responsible writer should acknwoledge that ignorance rather than just say it's too conveeeeeenient.

Spies aren't infalliable by any means, and as for Moscow, hey - poisoning is so rare, it's a bit harder to be in practice at it than just blowing brains out.

[democracy eh]

26. Why does the trail for everything that smells, trace back to PNAC?

interesting piece

[On the Road]

37. PNAC? Sounds Like the Other Side of the Fence

on this one. KGB.

[neweurope]

12. I cant' quite believe the story.

And I think if Putin wanted somebody poisoned that person would be dead. And there wouldn't be tracks leading to Putin. Yushchenko allegedly had dinner with secret service personnel and fell ill after. I mean really...

B-)

[DS1]

14. So you're saying he 9/11'd himself...

[neweurope]

16. Or it was done without his knowledge but I feel pretty sure

it wasn't the Russians. They usually don't leave tracks as if a Yeti had been jumping around. I rather think it was done to make it look like it was them.

And I like your verb :)

[0007]

23. ...it could be another poor attempt of gaining control, much

like the Venezuela fiasco. If Russia wanted Mr. Yushchenko dead, he'd been in the ground weeks ago. I can't buy into the Russia factor.

junior and his laboratory rats didn't get it right!

[muriel_volestrangler]

47. Though it's not the first non-fatal poisoning accusation for the Russians

and that's just in this year.

Poisoned by Putin

The plane takes off. I ask for a tea. It is many hours by road from Rostov to Beslan and war has taught me that it's better not to eat. At 21:50 I drink it. At 22:00 I realise that I have to call the air stewardess as I am rapidly losing consciousness. My other memories are scrappy: the stewardess weeps and shouts: "We're landing, hold on!"

"Welcome back," said a woman bending over me in Rostov regional hospital. The nurse tells me that when they brought me in I was "almost hopeless". Then she whispers: "My dear, they tried to poison you." All the tests taken at the airport have been destroyed - on orders "from on high", say the doctors.
...
In the morning, also at Vnukovo airport, Andrei Babitsky is detained on a specious pretext. As a result, another journalist known for seeing his investigations through to the end and being outspoken in the foreign press is prevented from going to Beslan.

Word comes that Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia, rejected by the authorities for advocating a settlement of the Chechen crisis, suddenly walked into negotiations with the terrorists in Beslan. He walked in alone because the people at the special services headquarters responsible for the negotiations were unable for 36 hours to agree among themselves who would go first. The militants give three babies to Aushev and then release 26 more kids and their mothers. But the media try to hush up Aushev's courageous behaviour: no negotiations, nobody has gone inside.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1300193,00.html

Sometimes, the absence of a person, from a story or a political campaign (The Guardian says Yushchenko lost 3 weeks of his campaign) can be all you want to achieve.

[nine23]

19. I love the "9/11'd himself". Brilliant. Can I use that?

It's just so..."enormous".

[aquart]

30. Beautiful men don't volunteer to be ugly. Sorry. No sell.

[DS1]

40. Be my guest

:-)

[rwork]

13. I like J.Stewert on the Daily Show

But he made sick joke about Yushchenko's bumpy face. The audience had a big laugh.

[hlthe2b]

17. If they did put it in soup, as has been reported/speculated....

How could it not have had a very strange/unpleasant chemical taste?

[Florida_Geek]

22. Could have been what saved him

Ate some of the soup but did not finish it because of taste.

[hlthe2b]

25. Maybe.....

:shrug:

Of course if this was a major social dinner with lots of wine flowing, that could explain a bit too. (Certainly NOT blaming the victim, just pointing out the obvious--one is less aware of the specifics of a meal when there is lots of alcohol flowing).

[truthisfreedom]

28. nonsense. i eat sushi and often there's a lot of partying going on in a

group setting, and i can tell bad sushi instantly. an experienced drinker is not going to overlook a chemical taste in soup.

the big question for this particular topic is: what does dioxin taste like? we automatically assume industrial waste, but what if it's odorless/tasteless? some poisons are.

[hlthe2b]

32. Apparently not... There was a big Dixoin scandal in Belgium, some

years ago and subsquently, Coca Cola got caught up in a hysteria-related PR disaster when some of their product reportedly smelled/tasted funny, causing people to report inhalation-related nausea and fainting. Because of the prior issues with Dioxin, an assumption was made that it was Dioxin-contaminated. They lost $$millions on that little episode, when they failed to get out in front of the issue and were forced to pull Coke products from the shelves (even though it did not turn out to be dioxin). Google for the details, but I believe the accusations were taken seriously because dioxin does indeed have a chemical taste/smell to it.

[hlthe2b]

33. I think I'd know bad sushi even if I was 3 sheets to the wind..........

But, soup, if it had strong spices and odors of its own could mask enough of the chemical smell, I suppose that one could miss it at least initially-especially if somewhat impaired by alchol. Just a hypothesis. I certainly don't know.

[chookie]

48. As a drinker who loves Indian and Thai food...

...I'd be able to taste it through the spices, no matter how schnookered I was.

[daleo]

42. I heard it has a metallic taste

That was on a CNN interview the other day (Sunday, I think) with someone from the CUNY Faculty of Medicine, if I recall correctly. He mentioned that was the part of the case he didn't understand, which I took to mean he didn't see how someone would eat the required quantity of contaminated food, assuming it was in the soup. Yushchenko's wife is said to have claimed that she noted something like that when she kissed him later that night.

[6th Borough]

43. A round (or 12) of vodka before hand? /nt

[daleo]

44. Vodka martinis with a dioxin chaser

He must have a strong stomach. Seriously, though, I wonder how well somebody could tolerate ingesting high doses of this poison without becoming immediately ill and throwing up. I suppose there is just a lack of basic scientific information on the subject, which makes me doubt an experienced intelligence agency such as the KGB (or whatever it is now called) would choose this toxin. It could be a clumsy amateur attempt, or a "clumsy" professional attempt which was meant to be discovered, though.

[PATRICK]

18. A walking Love Canal

Hugh Carey once volunteered to drink a gallon of the Love canal water to prove the alarmists wrong. I hate to think what that would have done to his handsome features.

Forget democracy! Let's invite him to be an anti-dioxin poster pol and name one of the canal locks after him.

[Canuckistanian]

29. Drinking a gallon of Love canal water proves nothing

The REAL danger is living in that environment 24/7. Breathing it, washing in it, cooking with it...

These know-nothings should not be in charge of serious discourse at any level.

[Wabbajack]

34. Putin is a neo-fascist diCKtator

[Bono71]

38. He learned well from the old school commies in the KGB.

[Megahurtz]

35. UGHLLLL

:puke:

[MisterP]

39. if he gets in power, he'll deregulate and privatize,

resulting in--you guessed it--dioxin poisoning

[daleo]

41. It is a quibble, but they should say about 3000 times, not 6000

Since a normal value is between 15 and 45 times, it would be routine to take the middle value of 30 as representative, not the lower value of the range:

45*2200=99000
30*3300=99000
15*6000=99000

Furthermore, yesterday's Globe and Mail reported at least two cases of dioxin poisoning that were far more severe than Yushchenko's (as measured by dioxin levels in blood). So, at a minimum, this article seems to have cranked up the spin factor quite a bit.
from yesterday' Globe and Mail

Dioxin easy to hide, easy to swallow

But accidental poisoning by compound almost impossible, pharmacologists say

By ANDRÉ PICARD
PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTER
Tuesday, December 14, 2004 - Page A21
...
There have been media reports that Mr. Yushchenko's blood contained 1,000 times the normal rates of dioxin. But there is no single standard for an acceptable level.
...
According to an article published in the medical journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the highest recorded dioxin exposure in a human was 144,000 parts per trillion. It occurred in 1998 in a 30-year-old woman who worked at a textile plant in Vienna. She and a second woman who was 27, whose dioxin levels topped 26,000 parts per trillion, were believed to have been poisoned deliberately. One of the women suffered severe chloracne, which cleared up after a couple of years, while the other had a very mild case of acne and some minor gastrointestinal problems.

The biggest exposure to dioxin occurred in 1976 in Seveso, Italy, when an explosion at a pesticide plant released it in the vicinity of thousands of people. About 200 residents developed chloracne, but there was no apparent increase in cancer rates.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20041214/UKRAINE14/TPInternational/?query=dioxin

[NewYorkerfromMass]

45. the worst pictures I have seen of him are in this link

and they are not pretty.... http://www.turkishpress.com/world/news.asp?id=041213182138.r1b9xisd.xml

[bunny planet]

46. Geez, who had the first highest count ever recorded in human history????