On Friday, the news network Al Jazeera made an announcement: the British medical journal, The Lancet, was now supporting the theory that the deceased Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, had died of polonium-210 poisoning.
According to the report, independent scientists had reviewed earlier findings by Swiss scientists and: "endorsed their work, which found high levels of the highly radioactive element in blood, urine, and saliva stains on the Palestinian leader's clothes and toothbrush".
Wow, I thought. I'd been following the Arafat poisoning case for more than a year, ever since Al Jazeera itself first published the results of a news agency investigation on the case. After that investigation, led to the exhumation of Arafat's body, I looked not only at polonium-210's history as an assassin's agent but at other possibilities for the radioactive traces, such as exposure to cigarette smoke. It had seemed possible but inconclusive to me.
So the fact, that Lancet had published a peer-reviewed endorsement caught my attention. Well, I thought, so much for the other possibilities - now we're really talking undeniable homicide. But as it turns out, we're not really having that conversation yet. And part of the problem is that the Lancet article that Al Jazeera is touting is not exactly as described.
In theAl Jazeera piece you'll find a link to the Lancet paper (paywall). It takes you to an essay titled: "Improving Forensic Investigation for Polonium Poisoning."
And this essay is written not by a panel of independent experts but by scientists affiliated with the Institute for Radiation Physics in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is the laboratory that did the initial testing on which Al Jazeera based its report on Arafat's death. And these are the scientists reviewing that work; this essay is far more cautious than the news agency's analysis would lead you to believe.
It notes that the laboratory analyzed 75 samples, 38 from Arafat's clothes and belongings and the rest from reference samples, material known to be polonium free. "Several" of the Arafat samples read notably higher than the reference material but not all. The scientists note that Arafat's illness did not follow some of the classic lines of radiation exposure, such as immune suppression and hair loss. They also acknowledge that this doesn't rule out radiation poisoning; that not all people respond identically and that other symptoms, such as nausea or fatigue, do fit the pattern.
The scientists also acknowledge that the fact Arafat died in 2004 made it difficult to do precise readings of polonium-210 which is known to decay relatively rapidly (It has a half-life of 138.4 days, which means that what they found was breakdown products of that decay rather than the element itself.) "An autopsy would have been useful in this case," the researchers say, and they recommend that in the future, when poison might be suspected, tissue and blood samples be taken and preserved for later investigation.
That's, in fact, the conclusion of the essay. So why would Al Jazeera describe this as all out support for the poisoning theory? The Swiss scientists note that after the exhumation (which apparently they did not recommend) three different teams were assigned to analyze samples from Arafat's body: "Because of legal procedures, the date of publication of the detailed results of the exhumation analyses is unknown."
Perhaps this is just keeping a story alive. And, perhaps, a little bit of wishful thinking. And maybe, just maybe, a hint for more solid information to come.
Image: Polonium metal lattice/Wikipedia
