Arafat Assassinated?

Basic science question: if the polonium remained on his toothbrush etc. - why would it have decayed in his body?
 
Worm said:
Basic science question: if the polonium remained on his toothbrush etc. - why would it have decayed in his body?
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The question is phrased in a way which suggest to me that you make some unjustified assumptions. All Polonium decays*. It is a radioactive element with a half life of about 138 days. This means that every 138 days, half of the polonium have decayed. If not planted, the Polonium on the toothbrush is what remains from a much larger quantity of Polonium which has not decayed. (By a factor of a million, more or less.) That is why there are claims that the test results showed too much Polonium.

* To be pedantic, we are discussing The Po 210 isotope. But the whole point of killing with polonium is its fast decay, which results in radiation poisoning. You wont get much radiation poisoning from material with much lager lifetimes.
 
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I honestly wasn't making any assumptions, I was just curious about why polonium would be expected to decay from his body but not from clothing and so on. Your explanation makes this much clearer, thanks.

To be honest, I should have thought it through myself, but I was always better at maths than science.
 
Doctor Evil said:
The question is phrased in a way which suggest to me that you make some unjustified assumptions. All Polonium decays*. It is a radioactive element with a half life of about 138 days. This means that every 138 days, half of the polonium have decayed. If not planted, the Polonium on the toothbrush is what remains from a much larger quantity of Polonium which has not decayed. (By a factor of a million, more or less.) That is why there are claims that the test results showed too much Polonium.

* To be pedantic, we are discussing The Po 210 isotope. But the whole point of killing with polonium is its fast decay, which results in radiation poisoning. You wont get much radiation poisoning from material with much lager lifetimes.
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Nor do isotopes help with much shorter half lives, as they're gone before you have the time to administer it. ;)

There is a difference, though, between Po-210 half lives in and outside the body. Outside the body, it is only subject to the physical decay with 138 day half life. Inside the body, there are also biological processes at work that try to get rid of the polonium, thus giving a combined half life of around 50 days (CDC source). Of course, those processes stop at death. But it means that if (big if) polonium traces are found in Arafat's body, it is very very hard to determine how much polonium he had been administered in the first place.
 
ddt said:
Nor do isotopes help with much shorter half lives, as they're gone before you have the time to administer it. ;)

There is a difference, though, between Po-210 half lives in and outside the body. Outside the body, it is only subject to the physical decay with 138 day half life. Inside the body, there are also biological processes at work that try to get rid of the polonium, thus giving a combined half life of around 50 days (CDC source). Of course, those processes stop at death. But it means that if (big if) polonium traces are found in Arafat's body, it is very very hard to determine how much polonium he had been administered in the first place.
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If I understand correctly, the 50 days half life is the estimate for how long the polonium stays in the body. Of course the secreted polonium can then be found in feces and on objects that was handled by the poisoned person. In any case, I am not aware of any example in which the chemical environment can affect the nuclear decay rate of a radioactive element. (That would be a major scientific discovery.)

In any case, in the only known case of a person which was poisoned with polonium the poisoned person lived for 21 days after the poisoning. This means that, at least in that case, the biological cleaning mechanisms cleared less than half of the polonium.
 
Why would it be assumed that it was Israelis who would assassinate Arafat?

Did he not have other rivals and enemies than the Israelis?

I would not rule them out, but I might want to consider a pool of suspects and motives.

On the other hand, my original comment fits, in my mind, the 'most likely' scenario.
But not the only scenario.

Hmm, what scenario should we stick to? :p

(How is Claus, I wonder?)
 
Ziggurat said:
We haven't even cleared the first hurdle to establish that he was assassinated at all, by anyone.
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Good point, but what has investigators digging into that angle is a provisional hypothesis that, due to traces of an unusual substance, his death was from other than natural causes.
 
Beerina said:
I had to laugh -- just after 9/11, when there were that day films of Palestinians cheering the towers falling, apologists claimed, fake! That's old footage of something else! CNN was like, "Like hell it is!" and it turned out to be real.
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It is impossible to tell what they were cheering for. Real my ass.
 
On topic: as has been mentioned, polonium 210 has a way too short half life for those people to have found anything after that long. And to those referring to Litvinenko, I wouldn't be so sure it was polonium 210 that killed him either.
 
Simon666 said:
On topic: as has been mentioned, polonium 210 has a way too short half life for those people to have found anything after that long. And to those referring to Litvinenko, I wouldn't be so sure it was polonium 210 that killed him either.
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So the Israeli's might get away with it?
 
No, the Israelis are blamed incorrectly, nothing should have been found anyway and that Swiss lab that allegedly found something consists of clowns that probably measured the polonium of their own cigarettes they are chain smoking in the lab.
 
Speculation. Arafat was already on the sidelines when he got sick. Nobody cared about him at this point.
 
I predict that if the investigation does not yield the conclusions expected of it, those who demanded it will accuse the investigators of bowing to Zionist pressure/payoffs.
 
Doctor Evil said:
* To be pedantic, we are discussing The Po 210 isotope. But the whole point of killing with polonium is its fast decay, which results in radiation poisoning. You wont get much radiation poisoning from material with much lager lifetimes.
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I've had plenty of lager in my lifetime, but do you really think Yassir was a victim of alcohol poisoning? :D

Fun with typos ... but wait, it's Saint Paddy's day soon, and the beer will all begin to glow green. Dare I drink it? :eek:
 
OK, there is a report that they can now prove Polonium poisoning.

Just to talk a little about the problem; 210-Po is probably the ideal radiological poison.

It is an alpha emitter which means you can handle it with some care and be OK, but is deadly once inside the body, and it has a very short half-life;

116 days. It decays into 209-Tl which is a beta emitter has a half-life in the minutes and then into lead.

And he died 3037 days ago. That is 26 half-lives.

And 210-Po is deadly in a very small dose.

26 halvings.

A deadly dose is 50 ng.

7.4505806e-13 g would remain of that now.

Mass would be on the order of 1e-22 g for one atom, so there might be around one billion atoms left in the whole mass of the corpse and much less in a smaller sample.

What I am saying is that detection is very unlikely unless the 210-Po is impure and you are detecting some other radioisotope in the 238-U decay chain. And there is another problem; There is 238-U in the natural environment. It's in many rocks, and when you are talking 26 half lives you are down in the range of natural variability.

(ETA: And by ideal I mean as in easiest to go undetected and foolproof in effect.)

ETA2: Report; http://cazadebunkers.wordpress.com/...o-por-envenenamiento-en-el-hospital-de-paris/
 
Except that some estimates enough Po 210 to kill quickly costs in the price range of a couple of tens of millions of dollar. Poor me will have to stick to rat poison to kill my wife. Ideal poison if you're rich maybe.
 
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