Glowing Peril: The Magical Glitter That Poisoned a City
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Goiânia, Brazil, a junk dealer acquires an old medical device from two scrap-metal scavengers. The device itself isn't useful, but it comes with precious lead which will fetch him good money. There's something else inside the device, too: a curious, crystal-like substance that glows bright blue in the dark.
At first, the dealer is mesmerized by it: he wants to turn it into jewelry for his wife. But, everyone who comes into contact with the magical glitter seems to get sick. His own family succumbs to nausea and vomiting. A doctor suggests food poisoning - but this isn't like any food poisoning they've ever known before. And soon, the whole city is contaminated.
No-one saw this horrifying radiation accident coming. Should they have?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:09.3 | Malcolm here. Malcolm Global here. |
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| 0:50.7 | The body of a six year old girl is about to be buried. |
| 0:58.0 | She died in isolation, in a hospital bed, a terrible death, her face and neck swollen, ulcers on her stomach, internal bleeding from almost every organ. |
| 1:11.0 | Just a few weeks earlier, she'd been completely fine. A normal, healthy, happy girl. Her |
| 1:18.9 | name was Lader. Her body is in a coffin on a vehicle making its way to the cemetery. The |
| 1:26.8 | coffin is lined with lead. Hundreds of people have gathered at the entrance to the cemetery, but they're not here to mourn. |
| 1:36.0 | They're here to protest. |
| 1:39.0 | They don't want the body of this six-year-old girl to be buried in their city. They hurl stones into the |
| 1:45.0 | road trying to block the vehicle's path into the cemetery. When that doesn't |
| 1:49.8 | work, they throw stones at Leedas coffin. |
| 1:56.0 | The year is 1987. The location is Goyanya, a city in Central Brazil. |
| 2:01.0 | And the people of Goyanya have just been through an experience that few of them yet |
| 2:06.1 | understand and none had seen coming. This is a story about ignorance, which is bad, and something else. |
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