Bolonium

Over the weekend, the Lancet published an article called "Improving forensic investigation for polonium poisoning" which is being misrepresented by the media, especially Arab media.

AFP reports:

Swiss radiation experts have confirmed they found traces of polonium on clothing used by Yasser Arafat which "support the possibility" the veteran Palestinian leader was poisoned.

In a report published by The Lancet at the weekend, the team provide scientific details to media statements made in 2012 that they had found polonium on Arafat's belongings.

This is not the results of the tests done on exhumed samples from Arafat. This is simply a regurgitation of what the Swiss researchers said last year, just published in a new place.

The very end of the AFP report confirms this:

Beatrice Schaad, head of communications at the Vaudois University Hospital Center which is in charge of the institute, said the case report was the "scientific version" of what was given to the media.

"There is nothing new compared with what was said" in 2012, she told AFP. "There is still no conclusion that he was poisoned."

For those who cared, the specific results were published last year as well. And the numbers still don't add up.

The current Lancet article says:

According to biokinetic modelling (see appendix), the measured activities of ²¹⁰Po of several mBq per sample are compatible with a lethal ingestion of several GBq in 2004.

As I noted last year, Arafat's underwear urine stains were measured to have an astounding 180 mBq, over one hundred times the expected amount one would have expected to see in 2012, based on radioactive decay, of a dosage of polonium that would kill a man in a month.

Again, not that I am a fan of conspiracy theories, but these results would make sense only if the polonium was planted afterwards.

And, as I have noted, there were major irregularities when Arafat's body was exhumed, in that the PLO insisted that Russians be involved in the exhumation, and that only a Palestinian Arab pathologist was allowed to physically take the samples, with no one else observing him. If someone wanted to get advice on how to plant polonium on the samples - as well as polonium itself - Russia would the first choice.

Maybe this is why the investigation has been taking so long. If the polonium was planted, the researchers would probably be seeing results that are inconsistent or that otherwise don't make sense.