WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: Polonium-210: Murder Weapon and Public Health Threat

SPEAKER: Dr. Charles W. Miller,

TIME: Wednesday February 6, 2013 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

On November 23, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko died in London as a result of being poisoned with Polonium-210. Public health authorities in the United Kingdom (UK) subsequently found Polonium-210 contamination at a number of locations in and around London. UK authorities determined that citizens of 52 countries other than the UK may have been exposed to this contamination, and asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to contact approximately 160 such individuals in the United States. These citizens were contacted and advised that their risk of adverse health effects is likely to be low, but, if they were concerned, they should contact their primary health care provider. In turn, physicians were referred to state and local public health departments or CDC for further information on Po-210, including where they could seek testing of 24-hour urine samples for Po-210, if desired. CDC posted guidance for members of the public and physicians on its website, and it responded to numerous inquiries from national news media. Working with UK colleagues, CDC developed guidelines for assessing when a measurement of Po-210 in urine was or was not a level of concern. Because the death of Mr. Litvinenko was an ongoing criminal investigation, one of the major challenges of this response was the inability to obtain all of the technical detail desired to perform assessments. This complicated the ability of CDC to communicate effectively with citizens and members of the public health community. As a result of this experience, CDC has identified at least five key issues that the U.S. public health system needs to address: (a) who are the appropriate overseas contacts; (b) how are public health follow ups coordinated in a decentralized system; (c) how are confidentiality concerns addressed; (d) how can the required people sampling time (days) be reduced; (e) how can public health be better prepared to respond to an incident involving radioactive materials? This Po-210 poisoning incident has the attributes of a radiological dispersal event. These and other issues identified from this response will help prepare the public health community to respond more effectively to future incidents of this nature. In addition, this incident, as well as the major nuclear power plant incident that occurred in Fukushima, Japan, in March 2011, illustrates the opportunity that the physics community has for engaging in in such incidents, both officially and unofficially.