27 years before Chernobyl disasterMexico City lived in its meats the effects of ionizing radiation. With a clear parallelism with the death of Marie Curie About 30 years before, a Mexican family disappeared after being exposed for days to a radioactive capsule that they found out there.
And the worst thing is that he never clarified as something so dangerous ended in that house.
The case. In March 1962, a family composed of five members (father, pregnant mother, paternal grandmother, a daughter and a son) moved to a new house in Mexico City. It is estimated that, playing in a garden, the child found a ‘capsule’ and took it. With about ten years, I was unable to know what it was, but the capsule is not that it had an easily recognizable badge.
The cell. They did not know that this small cobalt-60 capsule of just a few centimeters had an activity of 200 gigabequerelios (GBQ). To put it in context, it is a radiation between hundreds and thousands of millions smaller than the one in Chernobilbut enough to wreak havoc without proper protection. And, of course, the manipulation was far from being correct.
Like Marie Curie 30 years before with her radioactive tubes, the little one took the capsule for a few days Cobalt-60 In the pants pocket, absorbing more than directly the ionizing radiation. The mother took her and kept her in a kitchen drawer. Now We still have problems with radiation in Chernobyl And they are built great sarcophagi to contain itso a wooden drawer had little to do.
The piece
Tragic outcome. A few days later, the mother began to notice that glass vessels began to change color. It is a phenomenon called radiation solarization which occurs when transparent materials such as glass are subjected to high energy radiation (such as X -rays or gamma). Depending on the color of the glass and its composition, the new hue varies, but the effects are patent.
It also began to cause mysterious symptoms in different family members, such as tiredness at the beginning and vomiting. He outcome It was expected. At the beginning of April, a few days after the finding of the radioactive pill, the child died. It was the one that received the biggest doses, which caused great damage to the bone marrow, infections and necrosis in the areas of maximum exposure.
The mother, who was the one who spent the longest in the kitchen, died in July due to hemorrhages in hematopoietic tissues. The two -year -old younger sister died in August after developing respiratory infection, anemia, leukopenia and thrombocytopenia. The grandmother was the last one: in October of that year and for causes similar to those of the girl. The father received a high dose, but as time was spent at home for work, he survived.
A plane of the house, about 25 m². The location of the pill in the kitchen is marked with the “radiation” symbol
Explanations? In just eight months, that little radioactive battery ended five family members and here the most interesting question is how something like that, especially when there was already knowledge of the danger of the radioactive material, ended without protection in the garden of a house. The most serious thing is that 60 years have passed and there is no official version.
The capsule, after being obsolete, was removed from a hospital where it was used in radiology equipment and was not transported with the necessary protection measures. There begin the versions that point that he arrived at a landfill next to other waste, but without signaling about the danger it represented and, in some way, ended in that garden. A Report Medical of the 1964 pointed out that the piece was in a lead container that was granted to the family for their care, but without informing its content or danger. The only clear thing is that he left the hospital without proper surveillance and the head of that cobalt capsule was not found.
Was not the only one. That mystery has given rise to conspiracy theories such as ensuring that it was a premeditated event that ended in that family, but they are still that: theories. And, although it would have been a perfect story for some film with supernatural component (mysterious deaths, change of color in objects), nothing was done with it. Nor are there great documentaries, contrary to what happened with another radiation case with a cobalt capsule-60: that of Ciudad Juárez in 1984.
The protagonist was another radiotherapy unit with Cobalt-60, but on this occasion, an improperly dismantled. Destined to the garbage dump, when the operators pierced the unit with cobalt-60, the particles were shot, contaminating thousands of tons of metal destined to create construction pieces and metal bases for tables. During the next months, hundreds of houses were built that had to be demolished, and tons of contaminated metals that had been distributed throughout Mexico and the southern United States were also recovered.
It is estimated that some 4,000 people were exposed, without catastrophic consequences, but leaving a valuable lesson about the risk of recycling obsolete medical machinery.
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