Yushchenko Had High Poison Level

New tests reveal that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko’s blood contains the second-highest level of dioxin poisoning ever recorded in a human -- more than 6,000 times the normal concentration, the expert analyzing the samples said.

Abraham Brouwer, professor of environmental toxicology at the Free University in Amsterdam, where the blood samples were sent for analysis, said they contained about 100,000 units of dioxin per gram of blood fat.

However, the concentration could prove to be even higher, or lower, once results are in from a more definitive test, said Arnold Schechter, a specialist in dioxin analysis from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Those results are expected this week.

The test also will show how long Yushchenko might display symptoms from the poison.

Schechter said it also could determine whether Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin-like PCBs, rather than dioxins. PCBs were used in electrical transformers and as hydraulic fluid until they were banned in much of the world in the 1970s because of their extreme toxicity and their persistence in the environment.

Brouwer’s team has narrowed the search from more than 400 types of dioxin to about 29 and is confident it will identify the poison by week’s end.

“From a [chemical] fingerprint, at least you can deduce what kind of sources might have been involved,” Brouwer told Associated Press. “The labs will ... try to find out whether it matches any of the batches of dioxins that are around, so that maybe you can trace it back to where it was ordered or where it came from.”

Experts say Yushchenko, whose face has been pockmarked and disfigured, probably has experienced the worst effects already and should gradually recover.

The 50-year-old pro-Western candidate, who faces Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovich in a repeat runoff on Dec. 26, fell ill after having dinner with Ukrainian Security Service chief Ihor Smeshko and his deputy, Volodymyr Satsyuk, on Sept. 5. Yushchenko reported having a headache about three hours after the dinner, and by the next day had developed an acute stomach ache.

He later suffered pancreatitis and gastrointestinal pain, as well as a severe backache.

About three weeks after his first symptoms, Yushchenko developed the rough, acne-like rash on his face that is the hallmark of dioxin poisoning.

“It was very late before the rash started to develop, so if he had died it would have been a mystery illness of his pancreas, his liver or his gut and they would have said maybe it’s some rare bug thing,” said John Henry, a toxicologist at London’s Imperial College. “He would have died within a few days and nobody would ever, ever have thought of dioxins.”

Brouwer said the highest level on record was in a woman in Vienna, who was intentionally poisoned in the mid-1990s. Tests showed her blood had 144,000 units per gram of fat, and she survived.

“We don’t actually know what the lethal dose is,” Brouwer said.

The woman, who was among five people deliberately poisoned at a textile institute in 1997, was sick for two years, said Schechter, who was involved in tracking the case.

Delivering the dose Yushchenko received would not be difficult, experts say. If the dioxin he ingested is the most hazardous type, tetrachlorodibenzoparadioxin, or TCDD, it would take only a drop or two, or a tiny amount of powder mixed in food, to poison him.

Research suggests that Yushchenko faces an increased risk of heart attack, cancer, diabetes, muscle aches, irritability, fatigue, immune deficiency and other less severe symptoms, but it is unclear how high that risk is after a single poisoning.