Dioxins and Yushchenko

If you believe the Austrian doctors, their finding is really shocking...



http://cnn.com/ ... yushchenko



They claim that the hypothesis about Viktor Yushchenko, the West-leaning presidential candidate in Ukraine (the situation has already been discussed here), who has been poisoned by dioxins, is now "rock solid". The concentration of dioxins in his blood is 1000 times larger than normal (actually 6000 times, according to the Financial Times)!



You know, dioxins are never healthy - they always represent a risk of cancer as well as other illnesses. In the Czech Republic, we know the word "dioxin" in relation with a chemical company called Spolana Neratovice that has been blamed for emitting more dioxins to the environment than what would be appropriate - and 80 people in the period 1964-68 became victims and suffered from similar problems as Yushchenko. (Spolana was producing something that, paradoxically and through various contracts, was used by the U.S. army in Vietnam as Agent Orange.) However, I am sure today even Greenpeace would not claim that the concentration of dioxins in the blood of citizens near Spolana is larger than the normal limits by three orders of magnitude! The situation improved drastically since the 1960s although it's not perfect yet.



Assuming the most obvious explanation for the large concentrations of dioxins in Yushchenko's blood, this event really looks like a horror story from the old Stalinist times - although the main open question remains "who did it?". Such things have been unfortunately common in the former Soviet Union, see e.g. the examples here:



http://csmonitor.com/ ...



Yushchenko had a dinner with a chief of the secret service or who was that exactly - and the following day he got sick.



I wish Viktor Yushchenko a lot of optimism and good luck. It's too late to worry about anything.