It is really strange that British doctors determined thallium in the body of the Russian defector Litvinenko at least only two weeks after the poisoning.
Thallium poisoning by ingestion may be diagnosed by x-ray as thallium is radio-opaque.
Thallium poisoning is not rare in Britain. Reading a famous novel by Agatha Christie describing a case of thallium poisoning with a typical clinical picture was not even necessary for British doctors. Thallium was widely used as a rat poison in Britain years ago and is still being used in some developing countries. Thallium was widely applied for homicide in Britain during several centuries. This type of poisoning is described in every textbook for medical students.
The doctors suspected thallium only after Mr Litvinenko lost his hair, a very typical sign, which usually happens only 2 to 3 weeks after the poisoning. And that might be too late for Mr Litvinenko to survive the attack because he didn' get the correct treatment in proper time, receiving no antidote, potassium ferrihexacyanoferrate, or Prussian blue or Berlin blue.
Another striking case was the FSB poisoning of the current Ukrainian President Yushchenko in 2004. He was examined several times in a private clinic in Austria, and the doctors coudn't find the the poisoning agent for a correct treatment of the prominent patient. The agent was found purely accidently. A doctor in the US who previously dealt with dioxin poisoning saw the picture of Mr Yushchenko with typical swells in a CNN news broadcast and phoned the station asking Mr Yushchenko's doctors to check for the dioxin. Austria doctors immediately summoned their prominent patient from Kyiv to their clinic in Vienna and found dioxin in his body. If the American doctor paid no attention to the news, Ukraine could have had another president now.
KC
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