Glowing Peril: The Magical Glitter That Poisoned a City
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Her body is in a coffin on a vehicle, making its way to the cemetery. The coffin is lined with lead. Hundreds of people have gathered at the entrance to the cemetery, but they're not here to mourn. They're here to protest. They don't want the body of this six-year-old girl to be buried in their city. They hurl stones into the road, trying to block the vehicle's path into the cemetery. When that doesn't work, they throw stones at Leda's coffin.

The year is 1987. The location is Goiânia, a city in central Brazil. And the people of Goiânia have just been through an experience that few of them yet understand, and none had seen coming. This is a story about ignorance, which is bad, and something else, something much worse. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. MUSIC

A Sunday morning in Goiania. A young man gets a visit from his friend. Both are poor. They scrape a living by scavenging for scrap that they can sell to junk dealers. The friend has heard a rumour about something that they might be able to scavenge and sell. Lead.

Lots of lead. So much that it's far too heavy for him to deal with on his own. Come and help me, he says. But it's Sunday. Oh, come on. It's only half a mile away. The two scavengers take a wheelbarrow to the site of an old hospital, demolished a couple of years before. But one building still stands amid the rubble. It used to be the Goiânia Institute of Radiotherapy.

Apparently there's some kind of legal dispute about who owns the building. That's why it hasn't been knocked down with the others. Someone has bashed a hole in the wall. Homeless people sometimes sleep inside. When the security guard isn't there, he isn't there today. The two scavengers enter the building. In a room, they find the device that has the lead in it. So much lead. Hundreds of kilos. Clearly it's some kind of medical device.

Cased in plastic, shaped a bit like a teardrop, two or three feet across. Attached by a metal beam to a thick concrete wall. In such a way that you can aim the pointy bit in different directions. The friends have brought some simple tools with them. They set about taking the device apart. It takes four hours. And how are they going to carry a chunk of lead weighing hundreds of kilos?

They try putting the wheelbarrow on its side and pushing the massive lead into it. That doesn't work. It just breaks one of the wheelbarrow's legs. But in the centre of the device, they've uncovered a part that's come loose. A cylinder, about a foot long. It must weigh 100 kilos. But they can lift it into the wheelbarrow, just about.

Taking turns, they push the barrow back to the scavenger's house and set the heavy cylinder down in the yard under a mango tree. Their work isn't done yet. On and off for the next few days, they hammer away at the cylinder. Before they can sell the lead, they have to separate it out from some other stuff. The lead surrounds a sort of capsule made from stainless steel, which has no scrap value.

There's a tiny little window into the capsule. They bash it in with a screwdriver. One of the scavengers starts to feel ill, nausea and vomiting. So does the other. And one of his hands is swelling up. He goes to the doctor. Maybe it's an allergic reaction to some food, the doctor says. At last, though, they've got the valuable lead off that little steel capsule.

They wheel it all to the yard of the local junk dealer. I'll buy the lead, he says. I've got no interest in the steel capsule, but fine, whatever, just put it in the garage. That night, the dealer turns off the light in the garage. But the room isn't plunged into darkness. Instead, there's a beam of blue light shining from the tiny broken window of the capsule like a spotlight on the wall.

It looks eerie and beautiful. The dealer takes the capsule into the house and puts it in the closet where his wife keeps her clothes. He invites neighbours to come and see the blue glow. What's glowing is a kind of crystal-type stuff in the middle of the capsule. There isn't much of it, barely a spoonful. The dealer shows his brother, a bus driver. 'I'm going to get jewellery made for my wife from it,' he says.

The brother picks up a grain of the glowing substance. It crumbles into powder between his fingers. He brushes it off on his palm. You won't be able to make anything from that. The dealer and his family are now all getting ill, nausea and vomiting. The wife goes to see a doctor. Sounds like food poisoning, the doctor says. The wife thinks back. Who's ill and what have they all consumed recently?

There's just one thing that links together everyone she knows who's sick. The Coca-Cola they drank. The night she made a black bean stew. She still has some of the Coca-Cola, and she takes it to the local public health centre, the Vigilancia Sanitaria. I think this is bad, she says. Can you run some tests? In another part of the city, another of the junk dealer's brothers has heard about the illness, and he goes to visit.

It's been only a few days, but the dealer's family are getting dramatically worse. It's not just nausea and vomiting now. They've got strange marks on their skin. Their hair is falling out. Neighbours are gossiping that they've got AIDS. The dealer's teeth are coming loose. The dealer thanks his brother for coming to check on them and says, ''Before you go, come and see this thing I bought. ''It glows blue. It's beautiful.''

It is indeed beautiful. The brother wraps a bit of the substance in a piece of paper and slips it into his pocket to take home. He wants to show it to his six-year-old daughter. Later, look at this. The little girl picks some up and crumbles it in her fingers. It's like a special kind of glitter. A neighbour walks by and remarks on the glow. The brother playfully daubs some of the powdery substance on her neck. ''Your husband will find you in the dark tonight.''

Leda's eating a boiled egg now, her fingers still glowing blue. She always forgets to wash her hands, no matter how many times they tell her. That night, Leda vomits. The next day, the neighbour's neck is irritated. Could there be something bad about that glowing powder? The junk dealer's wife has started to wonder the same thing.

This isn't like any food poisoning she's ever known. That means it can't be the Coca-Cola. So what else links everyone she knows who's ill? She takes the stainless steel capsule with what's left of the crumbly crystals and goes back to the Vigilancia Sanitaria, the same place she'd taken the Coke. She puts the capsule on the doctor's desk. This thing is killing my family.

The doctor doesn't really know what to make of it, but it's clear that the woman is in a bad way. He sends her to the hospital for tropical diseases. Perhaps they can figure out what's wrong. He gets on with his day. After a while, he looks again at the thing on his desk and thinks, "What if she's right? What if it is dangerous?" He takes it outside and puts it on a chair in the courtyard, for now. He should probably get rid of it, but how? He's not sure.

He calls the fire department. Meanwhile, at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, one doctor looks at the lesions on the dealer's wife's skin and thinks, "That looks like a radiation burn. But how can that be?" He happens to know a nuclear physicist who's currently visiting the city and calls him up. Can he help them investigate? The physicist agrees, but he needs a radiation meter. Where can he get one in this city?

He tries the local office of a federal government agency that does geological surveys. He persuades them to lend him a meter. He takes it to the Vigilância Sanitaria. Outside the building, he turns the meter on. It shoots right off the scale, in whatever direction he points it. How annoying. The meter must be faulty. He goes back to the agency's office and swaps it for another one. The same thing happens. Seems like it's not a fault.

He goes inside the building and meets the doctor who put the capsule in the courtyard. Don't worry, says the doctor. I've called the fire department and they've decided how to get rid of the stuff, whatever it is. They're going to throw it in the river. No, says the physicist. Don't do that. That's the worst possible thing you could do. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Ottawa, Illinois. In 1922, a small town of 10,000 people. A new employer has just moved into the old high school building. Radium Dial Studio requires the services of several girls for studio work. Ideal location and surroundings. Good pay while learning. The work, as the company's name suggests, involves painting dials with radium.

dials of clocks and watches and instruments on airplanes. And why radium? Because mixed with phosphor, it glows. A bright greenish glow. You can see in the dark what time it is or how high your plane is flying. Radium is still fairly new, discovered by Marie Curie in 1898.

In Ottawa, Illinois, 19-year-old Catherine Wolfe is one of the first to be employed at Radium Dial. Her story is among those told in Kate Moore's brilliant book, The Radium Girls. We were taught how to point camel hair brushes with our tongues, says Catherine. We would first dip the brush into water, then into the powder, and then point the ends of the bristles between our teeth. Every line had to be just so.

The glowing powder got everywhere. When the girls were going out on the town with their boyfriends, they'd sometimes wear their party dress to work because then, at night, the dress would glow as they danced the Charleston. Sometimes, at lunchtime, the girls would go into a darkened room and paint their faces with leftover radium, glowing eyebrows or moustaches. They'd look in the mirror and laugh. A couple of years after she started work at Radium Dial...

Catherine developed a limp. I began to feel pains in my left ankle, which spread up to my hip. Other workers were getting health problems too, often with loose teeth and sore gums. Catherine's friend Peg, for example, had to have a tooth taken out, and the hole in her gum just wouldn't heal. The dentist was baffled.

One day the boss announced that the girls must no longer use brushes to paint the dials. They had to switch to glass pens instead. They weren't happy. The new pens, said Catherine, were awkward and clumsy. The brushes had been much more precise because you could shape the tip of the brush between your lips. But now they were being told that anyone seen putting a brush to their lips would be sacked. It was all very strange.

Why would the company do that? Anyway, it didn't last for long. The work was so much slower with the new pens, in just a few months the boss had quietly dropped the whole idea. They were back to using the brushes again. In 1928, the local newspaper printed a story that shocked them. "Startling jump in the toll of radium poison victims." Radium poison? What was this?

The report was about a court case in New Jersey. Another company that employed women to paint radium on dials had just settled a lawsuit brought by its workers. The early symptoms of poisoning among dial painters, said the news report, often included loose teeth and gum decay. It sounded to the girls in Ottawa very much like what was happening to them. The chill of fear was so depressing, says Catherine, that we could scarcely work.

But the boss at Radium Dial stepped in to reassure them. Don't worry about these stories, he said. There's nothing to them. You see, this other company uses radium paint made with mesothorium. That must explain it. We use pure radium, and there's no problem with that at all. But to put your minds at rest, he says, we're bringing in medical experts to test you.

The experts took x-rays and blood. They ran a special test for radioactive breath that had just been devised for that New Jersey court case. Time went by and the girls heard nothing. They grew restive and went to see the boss. Where were the results? My dear girls, said the boss, if we were to give the medical reports to you, there would be a riot in this place. Catherine and her colleagues didn't really know what he meant by that.

Years later, they found out. The test results had shown that more than half the workers had absorbed so much radiation from radium, they were measurably radioactive themselves. The boss had decided that the best way to deal with that finding was to hush it up.

Radium Dial took out a full-page advert in the local newspaper. We have had thorough medical examinations made by technical experts familiar with the conditions and symptoms of the so-called radium poisoning. Nothing even approaching such symptoms or conditions has ever been found. It was a flat-out lie, but it reassured the workers for a while. Even if Catherine's limp was getting worse...

and her friend Peg was having more and more problems with teeth coming out and gums not healing. Then parts of Peg's jawbone started to come away in her mouth, and she too got pain in her hips, so bad she could hardly walk. In 1929, six years after she'd joined Radium Dial, Peg collapsed at work. The company sent her to hospital. She died.

And in the dead of night, men came to take her body away. But Peg's brother-in-law was still in the hospital building, and he saw them. "'What do you think you're doing?' "'We're going to bury her.' "'Not like this you're not. She's a good Catholic girl,' said the brother-in-law, "'and she's going to have a mass and a funeral. Also, we want an autopsy with our own doctor present, not just yours.' "'Of course,' said the company men.'

But when the family's doctor arrived at the appointed time, he found the autopsy had already been done. There must have been some mix-up. Could he at least examine what remained of Peg's jawbone? No, the company's doctor had cut it away. Peg's jawbone simply wasn't there. Once again, the bosses at Radium Dial had decided the best way out of a difficult situation was to lie about it.

They told the local newspaper they had autopsied Peg's body and... There was no visible indication of radium poisoning. Catherine kept going to work at Radium Dial. She was finding it harder and harder to move around. The doctors in Ottawa said it was rheumatism. But for a company dogged by suspicion that its work made people ill, having such an obviously sick employee was a daily embarrassment.

In 1931, the boss called Catherine into his office. "I'm sorry, Catherine," he said. "We have to let you go. Your work is satisfactory. It's your being here in a limping condition. Everyone is talking about you limping. It's not giving a very good impression to the company." After nine years working at Radium Dial, Catherine no longer had a job. But she did have a mission.

She wanted to find out what was wrong with her and whether or not the radium really was to blame. If the doctors in small-town Ottawa couldn't help, she'd have to get another doctor from the city, Chicago. She sought out old workmates too, women who'd once painted dials with her and now had mysterious ailments, like Charlotte with a painful lump on her elbow the size of a golf ball. The new doctor was baffled.

But remember that court case in New Jersey, brought by other workers at another dial painting factory? Doctors there had been learning more about the various ways radium can affect the body, from fractures to cancers to anemia, symptoms that are hard to predict and take time to appear. Gradually, the doctors had been piecing together the clues. They'd been publishing articles in medical journals,

The doctors in Ottawa hadn't read those journals. The new Chicago doctor sought them out. And what he read left him in no doubt. Catherine and Charlotte went back to Radium Dial to confront their old boss. We have radium poisoning. We have legal advice that we are entitled to compensation. The boss looked at them. Catherine, barely able to walk...

Charlotte, with just one arm, the other with a lump on the elbow, had been amputated. I don't think, said the boss, that there is anything wrong with you. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.

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In Goiânia, at the Vigilância Sanitária, the physicist hurries to intercept workers from the fire department before they can pick up that strange steel capsule from the chair in the courtyard. "Don't go near it," he says. "Definitely don't throw it in the river. "It'll poison the whole city." He persuades the fire department to do something else instead. Evacuate the building right away. Don't let anyone in.

With the doctor, the physicist goes to the home of the woman who brought the capsule in. Outside the junk dealer's yard, he gets out his radiation meter. You have to get out of this house now, he tells the dealer, and your family, and your workers, and your neighbours. The dealer takes some persuading, but they all reluctantly agree.

The physicist and the doctor go to the state ministry of health and hear their powers of persuasion face their sternest test against the bureaucratic gatekeepers. Who are these two random people brandishing a mysterious device demanding to see the minister with no appointment straight away? They insist and the minister sees them. He can't get his head around what the physicist is telling him.

but he makes the calls he needs to make to the right government agencies. They swing into action. The glowing blue powder in the steel capsule is caesium-137, used at the time in radiotherapy devices for treating diseases such as cancer. If its radiation is narrowly focused by masses of lead to a tiny little window, it can cure.

take away the lead that contains the radiation, and it will kill. The first thing they have to do is stop that blue powder killing anybody else. They bring a crane to the Vigilância Sanitaria, where the capsule still sits where the doctor left it, on a chair in the courtyard.

The crane carefully lowers a wide section of sewer pipe around the chair. Then, they pump the sewer pipe full of concrete. It will absorb most of the radiation. The biggest threat is contained. But where has the glowing blue powder been? They trace everyone who carried it around. The scavengers, the junk dealer's bus driver brother, the other brother, later's father.

They take their radiation meters to every building the cesium was in. They evacuate 41 houses. Seven are so badly contaminated, there's no choice but to knock them down. They take away the ruins and the soil underneath in special drums. 275 lorry loads of waste will eventually be driven off and securely buried.

And there's plant life to check. You wouldn't want to eat mangoes from the tree in the scavenger's yard. And animals, pet dogs, it goes on and on. After six weeks, a worker's radiation meter springs randomly into life. It's a radioactive chicken crossing the road. The authorities take over the local sports stadium and ask residents to come by to be checked over. Thousands of people queue up.

249 set off the radiation meters. About half are lucky. Taking off their clothes and having a shower is enough to get them the all clear. The rest need medical care. The worst affected have so much cesium in their bodies, they're dangerously radioactive themselves.

They're corralled together in a sealed-off room in the hospital, including the dealer, his employees, his wife, his brothers, little Leda, the neighbour with the powder daubed on her neck. Four of them will die within the month. The nurses can't spend much time tending to them. It's too risky. After a couple of weeks, the president of Brazil pays a visit with his entourage. They're all in protective suits.

and they keep their distance. We were there in the corner, sitting on the mattress, remembers the bus driver brother. It felt like we were people from another world. The other brother, Leda's dad, can't stop crying. When Leda asks why, he says he has a speck in his eye. Don't worry, Dad, she tells him. I'm fine. The cesium in Goiania made people sick straight away.

The radium paint from the 1920s and 30s had more insidious effects, and the symptoms were disparate, from Catherine's limp to Peg's tooth to the lump on Charlotte's elbow. No wonder it took time at first for doctors to piece together what was happening. Radioactivity, after all, was a recent discovery. What it meant for human health was still unclear.

The dial painters were among the first to suffer its effects. In 1938, seven years after she lost her job at Radium Dial, Catherine Wolfe Donoghue sat in a courtroom. She was married now. She had two small children. Her health had continued to decline. Her jawbone broke apart at Easter as the priest gave her Holy Communion.

She weighed barely 70 pounds, but she still had faith that the doctors would discover a cure. And she'd been fighting. She'd organised her former workmates. She'd found a lawyer to represent them. Now she was telling the court how Radium Dial had done away with the glass pens and let the girls go back to shaping their brushes in their lips, long after the company was well aware of the danger.

That's the way this terrible poison got into our systems. Katherine died, age 35, just three weeks after the court delivered its verdict. Radium dial, it found, had shown gross negligence. The court awarded Katherine and her co-workers compensation, nowhere near enough, but the maximum the law allowed. The case helped reshape laws on workplace safety.

It helped scientists understand the risks of working with radioactive materials and how to manage them, just in time for the race to develop the atomic bomb. By 1987, half a century later, radiation was well understood. And yet, in Goiânia, here were people carting cesium around in wheelbarrows and on the bus, crumbling it between their fingers, daubing it on their necks. How could it have happened?

To start with, of course, the medical device containing highly radioactive material really shouldn't have been left in an abandoned building on a derelict site. I was asking for trouble. But who's to blame appears murky. The clinic's owners should have taken it away, but they were caught up in a legal dispute about who owned the building. A court said they couldn't go in.

The country's nuclear regulators should have been kept informed about where the device was. Nonetheless, 19 grams of cesium, just a spoonful, fell through the administrative cracks. 19 grams were enough to cause all those problems. Public communication was a problem too.

When investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency studied the aftermath, they said the clean-up itself went well. But people were confused about continuing levels of risk. Rumours ran riot. Some people panicked too much, like the hundreds of protesters who threw stones to try to stop Leda's burial, though the little girl's body in its lead-lined coffin posed no threat to anyone.

Others were far too blasé. One journalist recalls watching with incredulity a marriage right next to one of the most contaminated sites. The bride and groom exchanged vows as workers in protective suits walked past with drum after drum of radioactive waste. Were they not worried? Not at all, said the groom. God will protect us.

Seventeen days passed between the scavengers taking the radiotherapy device and the fire department nearly throwing it in the river. So many people saw the glowing blue powder. How's it possible that no one knew the glow meant danger? But then, why would they? We'd never heard of cesium, radiation, these things, says Leda's mum.

In 1987, there was no World Wide Web. They couldn't Google "glowing blue stuff". So I don't want to criticise the people who didn't know. Instead, I want to celebrate the curious. The doctor who thought, "This looks like a radiation burn." The physicist who found a radiation meter to borrow. The junk dealer's wife who stopped to think, "Why are we sick? What might explain it?"

Her first answer was wrong, it wasn't Coca-Cola. But she was asking the right questions. If she hadn't, who knows how much further the cesium would have spread. Catherine Wolfe and her colleagues asked the right questions too. The difference was that they had a boss who wanted to keep them from the answers. It seems bad when no one knows the truth, but it's far worse when someone's trying to suppress it.

Seven minutes, said the scientists, was the longest the nurses could stay by Leda's bedside without risking too much exposure to the cesium that was breaking down her body. One man didn't care about getting more radiation, Leda's dad. So what, he said, if I die with my daughter? He didn't die with his daughter, but he didn't live to old age. He started to smoke.

Endlessly, one cigarette after another, he died of emphysema, or that's what the death certificate said. Others say he died from grief or guilt. He never forgave himself for bringing that powder home. But it isn't a sin to be ignorant. Leda's dad had no reason to blame himself. Unlike the boss of Radium Dial, who seems to have felt no guilt at all.

Kate Moore's book is titled The Radium Girls, and next time I'll be back with Kate Moore herself for a cautionary conversation about their story. For a full list of all our sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohen, Lital Moulad, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com.

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