Penloom History · The stories they left out

Goiânia — the powder that glowed blue

Goiânia, Brazil, 13 September 1987

A clinic moved out and left its radiotherapy source in the ruins. A scrapyard owner opened it, and thought it was beautiful.

A radiotherapy clinic moved out of a building in Goiânia and left its caesium-137 source behind in the ruins. Two scrap collectors took the heavy core for the metal and sold it to a junkyard. The buyer broke the capsule open and found that the salt inside glowed blue in the dark.

He invited the neighbourhood

He thought it was beautiful. He invited people to see it and handed out grains as a curiosity; they rubbed it on their skin to watch it shine. A six-year-old girl named Leide das Neves Ferreira ate a sandwich with it on her hands and died on 23 October. The alarm was raised only when a woman carried what remained of the source across the city on a public bus to a clinic, where a medical physicist recognised it.

The number that tells the story

Four people died and 249 were contaminated — but the figure that says what this was is 112,800, the count of people screened. Leide was buried in a lead-lined coffin while a crowd tried to stop the burial.