Why did two thieves cost Brazil hundreds of millions of dollars?
Just 19 grams of blue powder, why did it almost destroy a city?
In October 1987, Ferreira, the owner of a scrap shop, discovered that his relatives and friends had died mysteriously, first his 6-year-old niece, then his wife, and then two employees working in the scrap shop, and they all died of acute illness.
This puts the time forward to September 17, when two people appear in Ferreira's scrap shop, Alves and Pereira, two well-known thieves in the area, who often steal machines from elsewhere and dismantle valuable things from them to sell in Ferreira's scrap shop for money.
The scrap they sold to Ferreira today was probably removed from a medical instrument, and Ferreira didn't care about it, he just had to collect the waste. One of them was a cylindrical container filled with blue powder that fluoresced in the dark, and Ferreira was attracted to the container after collecting the scrap, and called his wife, employees, and brother to see the "treasure" he had just received.
Ferreira's younger brother Ivo was also attracted by the blue powder, and asked his brother for a part to bring home, Ivo's daughter Ryder is only 6 years old, it is the age of beauty and fun, seeing this fluorescent powder, instantly happy.
Ryder learned from his mother's usual makeup, smearing blue powder on his face, eyelids and arms, and proudly showing his father his makeup.
What Ryder didn't know, however, was that these beautiful blue powders turned out to be life-sucking poisons.
The blue powder was found in the treatment machine that Alves and Pereira stole from an abandoned clinic, they stole the treatment machine and removed the lead and steel on it, and in the process of disassembly, the two had symptoms such as vomiting, swollen hands and feet, and went to the hospital for examination, and the doctor only said that it was allergy.
In fact, it is not allergies, but because the treatment machine they dismantled contains a deadly thing - cesium 137 radioactive source, the total cesium 137 powder in the treatment machine is only 19 grams, that is, the fluorescent blue powder we mentioned earlier, which is extremely radioactive and can kill people invisibly, but they do not know.
Because of this theft by Alves and Pereira, it has brought huge losses to the whole of Brazil. They first sold cesium-137 powder to the scrap shop owner Ferreira, killing four people.
Ferreira resold it to others, more than 118,000 people were directly or indirectly exposed to cesium-137 powder, and after testing, 244 people were found to be radioactively contaminated, of which 129 were contaminated, 50 were exposed to high doses of radiation, and 13 had severe bone marrow suppression.
Detecting contaminated people is easy, but finding out where those blue powders are going is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. Cesium-137 powder had even entered the food chain when it was discovered, as inspectors had detected radioactive material in human and animal excrement.
But Brazil sent seven or eight hundred people to test and decontaminate the entire city, and in order to prevent radioactive materials from continuing to cause harm, they demolished those places where pollution or radioactivity was found, and then dug up the surface of the place, even to a depth of one meter, to find clean and unpolluted soil to fill it.
It took more than 2 months to complete the inspection and decontamination of the entire city, which consumed a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to Brazil.
How did you find that there is a problem with the blue powder? In fact, Ferreira's wife found out, because since her husband collected the blue powder into the store, she and the staff of the store have developed some similar diseases, and her niece Ryder has died suddenly.
And later, after Ferreira resold the powder, their illness was alleviated, so she guessed that there might be something wrong with the blue powder. After discovering the problem, Ferreira immediately went to the relevant departments to react, which prevented a bigger disaster.
Alves and Pereira, the culprits of the disaster, were also exposed to radiation due to contact with cesium-137 powder, so much so that they needed amputation to maintain life.
Just 19 grams of cesium-137 powder almost brought ruin to the city of Brazil, and the nuclear sewage in Fukushima, Japan, contains this substance, and if Japan really discharged nuclear sewage into the sea and caused huge pollution to the sea, they would be sinners for the entire human race.
Nowadays, athletes all over the world are participating in the Olympic Games in Japan, not only to ensure that they have the energy to participate in the competition, but also to worry about whether the food they eat every day comes from Fukushima, and these operations in Japan are really incomprehensible. I hope that Japan can learn from history and not become a sinner nailed to the pillar of shame in human history.