Brazil Nuclear Deaths Bring Fallout of Fear

Like many people in Goiania, Lurdes Ferreira still has only a vague notion of what atomic radiation is, but she has learned how dangerous it can be. Radiation poisoning put Ferreira in a state shelter, sent her husband to the hospital and killed their 6-year-old daughter.

An unschooled woman of 35, plump and wide-eyed, Ferreira admitted last week that she does not understand how a mysterious blue powder called cesium 137 could have inflicted so much harm on her family.

“My head is so confused,” she told reporters. “The only thing I know is that we are going to have to have a long treatment.”

Ferreira is one of 25 Goiania residents who are confined to two state-run shelters while they undergo decontamination treatment. Ferreira’s husband, Ivo, is one of 14 who are hospitalized with severe radiation poisoning. And their daughter, Leide, is one of four radiation victims who have died so far.

More Than 100 Treated

More than 100 others who were contaminated by the cesium 137, which was pilfered from a radiation therapy machine in an abandoned cancer clinic and casually circulated throughout the city, have been treated and discharged.

But that is hardly the end of what has turned out to be one of the worst cases of radiation poisoning in the annals of atomic energy. The incident has sent shock waves throughout Brazil, caused the residents of this city to be treated like pariahs and raised questions about which government agencies ought to be responsible for protecting Brazilians from such calamities.

“It wasn’t her time to go,” Lurdes Ferreira, her brown eyes brimming, said of her daughter. “I think it could have been prevented.” Who is to blame?

“To this day I don’t know,” she said. “That is what I would like to know.”

Federal police have charged four private physicians and a radiology technician with criminal negligence in the case. The National Nuclear Energy Commission, the federal Health Ministry and the Goias state Health Department are also under investigation for possible negligence.

In addition to negligence, ignorance was a key element in the accident. Most of those who were contaminated by the cesium were unsophisticated people who did not link the material’s tantalizing glow with radiation, sickness and death.

Goiania, which lies about 100 miles southwest of Brasilia, is an agricultural center and state capital with high-rise towers at its center and horse-drawn carts on its outskirts. Its rapidly growing population is estimated at 1 million.

Since the end of September, when the radiation poisoning was discovered, the city has been awash in alarm and concern.

Stray Cats Being Shot

Recently someone has been shooting at stray cats at night, apparently afraid that they, too, were contaminated with radioactive material. Technicians examined one cat that had been shot and pronounced it clean. They were also called on to examine a fallen buzzard. The cause of death turned out to be a high-tension wire overhead.

Many residents have taken live cats, dogs, songbirds and other pets, including a white rat and a black snake, to a special station for screening with radiation detectors. The station, beside an old soccer stadium, also checks clothing, household belongings, cars and people.

Lines form there throughout the day. Since September, more than 78,000 Goianians have gone in voluntarily for screening.

In recent days, the screeners have issued more than 3,000 documents to certify that persons are radiation-free. The documents are being requested mostly by residents here who plan to travel to other states. They say hotel operators fear that guests from Goiania will bring contamination.

“A colleague of mine was going to travel and the hotel canceled her reservation,” saleswoman Maria da Gloria Silva said.

A national trade fair in Rio de Janeiro last week refused to accept an exhibition from Goias, the huge state in which Goiania and Brasilia are both situated. Officials complain that rejection by wholesale buyers has reduced Goias’ exports to other states by as much as half.

Lack of Knowledge Blamed

“A lack of knowledge has brought on all that panic, first in the city itself and then in the country,” said Maria Bezerra, a member of the Goiania City Council. She said community leaders are organizing an information campaign “to show that Goiania is not a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki or a Chernobyl.”

Donald Binns, a Brazilian physicist and radiation protection supervisor, said that ignorance is a major source of disruption in the aftermath of the radiation accident. He said, for example, that fearful neighbors of a woman who returned home after being decontaminated tried to burn her house.

“These people think it is a plague or something like that,” said Binns, 48, who works for the National Nuclear Energy Commission. “They confuse the contamination with a contagious infection from a virus or bacteria.”

Tracking the Cesium 137

He has been helping to coordinate radiation cleanup efforts since Sept. 30. In the process, he has tried to track the cesium 137 from the day scavengers removed it from the abandoned clinic of the Goiania Radiotherapy Institute.

The institute moved to new quarters in 1985, leaving behind a heavy machine that had been used to treat cancer with controlled doses of radiation.

Police say the old clinic was unguarded and doorless when Roberto Alves, 22, and Wagner Pereira, 19, entered the building on Sept. 13 and broke open the radiation machine’s protective lead casing.

They removed a stainless-steel cylinder the size of a gallon can and took it to the junkyard of Devair Ferreira, 35, a scrap metal and used paper dealer. Inside the cylinder was a platinum capsule a little more than an inch in diameter and an inch deep. It contained cesium 137, a highly radioactive product of nuclear reactors.

It is still not clear exactly when the capsule was broken open. Binns believes that Ferreira did it with a hacksaw on Sept. 13 or 14, but other accounts put the date much later in the month.

Glowed in the Dark

The material that spilled out was granular and dusty, with a texture like coarse salt, Binns said. It glowed in the dark, and because of the humidity in the air, it formed into lumps, he said.

For Ferreira, his family and friends, it was like carnival glitter. People played with it in the junkyard, took it home to their families, showed it around; it was wiped on clothing, sprinkled on furniture and floors.

Some people, enchanted with its strange beauty, rubbed it on their bodies.

“They said it was bright and beautiful, so they used it to decorate themselves,” Binns said.

Ivo Ferreira saw it at his brother’s junkyard and took a lump home in his pocket. He let his daughter, Leide, play with it on the floor. Afterward, as she ate a boiled egg, she swallowed some of the powder from her hands.

She was throwing up within 10 minutes, Lurdes Ferreira said. “I thought it could have been the egg that made her sick,” Lurdes said later.

Tropical Disease Diagnosed

As time passed, others fell sick, with lesions on their skin, nausea, headaches and fever. At first, some doctors thought they were dealing with a tropical disease, but in the last days of September health authorities finally realized that it was radiation sickness.

They did not know at first how widespread the contamination had been. Binns was called at home in Rio by a supervisor at the Nuclear Energy Commission.

“They just told me, ‘Donald, you take a plane to Goiania and solve this problem, and come back tomorrow,’ ” he said.

More than a month later, the problem is far from being solved.

Binns said contaminated survivors and several hundred people who were not contaminated but may have been exposed to radiation will have to be medically monitored for years to come. Many may eventually develop leukemia and other health problems, he said.

Radiation experts and doctors from all over the world have come to Goiania’s rescue, but they have had only partial success. Dr. Robert P. Gale of UCLA, a bone marrow specialist who treated victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, joined an international team of doctors in Brazil.

They are treating the most critically ill with an experimental medicine created through genetic engineering--granulocyte-macro-phage colony-stimulating factor--that stimulates the growth of blood cells. Gale and the others cared for six of the patients, including Leide Ferreira. Only two survived.

No New Cases Show Up

Although no new cases of personal contamination have turned up since mid-October, radioactive materials are still spread around Goiania.

In his makeshift headquarters under the soccer stadium, Binns explained a series of red, blue and green markings on a wall map of the city. Fifteen green squares designated places that had been decontaminated by chemical washing and removal of material. Seven blue triangles showed where decontamination was in progress. And eight red circles represented quarantined sites of heavy contamination that present serious cleanup problems.

“We may have to tear down some houses, two or three, that are so contaminated that it is not worthwhile to decontaminate,” Binns said.

Another physicist said a mango tree and the ground around its roots in Devair Ferreira’s junkyard will have to be removed because they absorbed rainwater containing cesium.

Binns predicted that the cleanup will take at least six months and that it will produce more than 40 tons of contaminated material to be disposed of, including 12 tons of scrap paper that has already been collected. The paper was contaminated because many of the people who handled the cesium made their living as scavengers of scrap metal and old paper.

No Permanent Disposal Site

What to do with all the waste has become a controversial problem, too. Goias officials say it can stay in the state only temporarily, and the federal government has no permanent disposal site for nuclear waste.

“We are not going to accept the waste staying here,” Councilwoman Bezerra said.

The waste is being packed in concrete-lined drums and steel containers. The first 42 drums were trucked last week to a temporary disposal site eight miles west of the city. Protesters tried to block the road to the area.

Some officials have expressed fear that not all the cesium has been found.

“I think we have found about 70%,” one cleanup official said privately. “I’m not too happy with the results.”

Helicopters with long-range radiation detectors used in uranium exploration have flown a grid pattern over the city. Teams with highly sensitive meters have walked the streets. Contaminated animals, including five pigs, have been hunted down and killed. Sewage has been monitored, and detectors are being used to check money as it passes through banks, Binns said.

Contaminated Money

Some contaminated money was found at a school but none in the banks. Technicians went to the city’s bus stations and detected two contaminated buses. A contaminated section of sidewalk and a bench at a bus stop were removed and added to the growing mass of waste material.

Meanwhile, federal police continue to investigate the case, trying to assess criminal responsibility and preparing dossiers for legal proceedings.

Drs. Carlos Bezerril, Orlando Teixeira and Criseide Dourado, the owners of the abandoned radiotherapy clinic, have been indicted for criminal negligence resulting in the four deaths so far. Also indicted are Flamarion Goulart, a radiology technician with the clinic, and Dr. Amaurillo Monteiro, a former owner. If convicted, they could be sentenced to up to 12 years in prison on each count. For now, they are free on recognizance.

Antonio Carvalho, the police officer in charge of the investigation, said in an interview that it is “quite possible, quite probable” that government officials will be indicted for contributory negligence.

“If the inspections had been made as the law requires, that machine would not have been abandoned for nearly two years,” Carvalho said.

Scavengers Won’t Be Charged

He said the two scavengers who removed the cylinder from the machine would not be charged because the building was open and unattended, and they did not break in.

The National Nuclear Energy Commission argues that its responsibility extends only to inspecting new installations of such equipment and that periodic inspections are the responsibility of health authorities. The state Health Department insists that it does not have specialists trained to inspect radioactive isotopes. It says this is the exclusive province of the Nuclear Energy Commission. The federal Health Ministry explains that its unit for inspecting radiotherapy had been dismantled and that a new unit had not been set up for that kind of work, so the Nuclear Energy Commission should have been doing it.

“Each one is attributing responsibility to the other, and the inspection was not done,” Carvalho said.

Jose Goldemberg, a leading Brazilian nuclear physicist and rector of the University of Sao Paulo, blames the Nuclear Energy Commission for the accident.

‘Responsibility Very Clear’

“I’m convinced that the responsibility is very clear,” he said.

He said he doubts that anyone in the commission will be prosecuted, but he voiced hope that the accident will force changes in its structure, making it more accountable.

“I think the basic lesson is that there was no accountability, and that non-accountability leads to these things,” Goldemberg said.