Imagine someone gives you a gift. A powder that glows in the dark with a mesmerizing blue light. Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s like something out of a movie. Now imagine you put this powder on your skin, show it to your friends, give it to your daughter to play with, and without knowing it, without feeling a thing, you’ve just signed the death warrant for the person you love most.
40 days later, you bury her. This is not fiction. This happened in Brazil, in Goiânia, Goiás, in September 1987. Today we will reconstruct, step by step, how the victims of the largest radioactive accident outside of nuclear power plants in the history of the world died.
And I need to warn you, the details are disturbing, because radiation doesn’t kill all at once; it kills slowly, cell by cell, organ by organ, and worst of all, without the victim realizing it until it’s too late. It’s great that we’re together to investigate this topic. I hope everything is alright with you.
The blue glow of death. To understand how these people died, we need to go back to September 13, 1987. On that date, two recyclable material collectors, Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira, entered an abandoned radiotherapy clinic on Avenida Paranaíba, in downtown Goiânia.
But wait, before we continue, I need to explain something to you. This clinic, the Goiano Institute of Radiotherapy, had not been abandoned the previous week. It had been deactivated since 1985, for two years, entire years with a radiotherapy machine containing highly radioactive material dumped inside, without supervision, without signage, without any protection.
The door didn’t even have a proper padlock. And do you know who was responsible for that? The doctors who owned the clinic, Carlos de Figueiredo Bezerra, Orlando Alves Teixeira, and Criseide de Castro Dourado, simply changed their address and left the radioactive source behind, as if it were an old sofa.
But it wasn’t a sofa; it was a capsule containing 19.26 grams of cesium-137 chloride, enough to contaminate an entire city. Well, going back to the scavengers, Roberto and Wagner were looking for scrap metal to sell. And inside, amidst the rubble, they found a cylinder of lead and steel weighing approximately 98 kilograms.
It seemed valuable. The two of them carried the piece in a wheelbarrow to Roberto’s house and began to disassemble it by hammering it together. But that cylinder wasn’t just any scrap metal; it was the head of a teletherapy device. Inside it, protected by layers of steel, lead, and iridium, was the sealed capsule containing cesium-137.
To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, the radioactivity of that capsule was 50.9 Terabecquerels, the equivalent of 1,375 curies. It’s as if each gram of that powder were a microscopic bomb firing invisible particles that destroy the DNA in your cells. And the half-life of cesium-137, that is, the time it takes for half of its radiation to decrease, is approximately 30 years.
This means that the dust will remain dangerous for about 300 years. The two scavengers dismantled the piece and on September 15th sold it to Devair Alves Ferreira’s scrap yard in the central area of Goiânia. Devair asked two employees, Israel Batista and Admilson Alves, to remove the lead that surrounded the fountain, and they did it with their bare hands.
When night fell, Devair passed through the junkyard yard and saw something that paralyzed him. The powder inside the open capsule glowed, an intense, mesmerizing blue, unlike anything he had ever seen in his life. That glow was caused by a physical phenomenon.
The radiation excited the surrounding air atoms, and the moisture absorbed by the cesium salt produced a luminescence visible in the dark. It was beautiful, and it was the most dangerous thing he could touch. Devair was delighted, so delighted that he took the material inside his house.
He showed it to his wife Maria Gabriela, to friends, and to relatives. He scattered fragments the size of grains of rice as if they were precious stones. People would rub it on their skin as if it were carnival glitter, put it in their pocket, and take it home.
A neighbor, Santana, also received fragments. Devair’s brother, Ivo Alves Ferreira, visited the junkyard and was equally fascinated. He stuck a screwdriver into the capsule, removed some of the powder, wrapped it in paper, and took it home.
Upon arriving there, he placed it on the floor of the children’s room. And so, without any alarm, without any warning, the contamination spread like an invisible trail through entire neighborhoods of Goiânia. It took 16 days, from September 13th to September 29th, before someone finally suspected that the enchanted powder was the cause of everything.
And who was that person? It was none other than Devair’s wife, Maria Gabriela Ferreira. She connected the dots. Devair lost all the hair on his body. His teeth began to loosen. He could no longer taste food.
Salt and sugar tasted the same. He swelled up. He could barely walk. And Maria Gabriela kept repeating: “It’s this thing that’s hurting us.” But Devair didn’t believe it. He loved that capsule.
On September 29th, Maria Gabriela collected parts of the material, put them in a bag, and personally went to the health surveillance office in Goiânia. Geraldo Guilherme da Silva Pontes, a neighbor, helped her carry the bag. He rested the bag on his shoulder and was left with a permanent scar where the material touched him.
That’s where the alarm was raised. The National Nuclear Energy Commission was activated, and that’s when chaos was installed. More than 112,000 people were taken to the Olympic Stadium in Goiânia for screening.
Of these, 249 showed significant contamination. 129 required permanent medical monitoring, 49 were hospitalized, 20 required intensive care, and the most serious cases were transferred by plane to the Marcílio Dias Naval Hospital in Rio de Janeiro. But for many people, it was already too late.
The damage was already done, the radiation was already inside their bodies, and nothing could completely remove it. How did the radiation kill each of them? Case one, Leide das Neves Ferreira, 6 years old.
And here is the most painful part of this story. Leide das Neves Ferreira was the daughter of Ivo Alves Ferreira, brother of Devair. She was only six years old. She was a kind, outgoing girl, full of dreams.
Her mother Lourdes said she always wanted to take pictures of her daughter before she started losing her baby teeth. “I want to take lots of pictures of you before you start losing your first baby teeth,” she had said, but she never got to see that happen. On September 24th, her father, Ivo, brought home that glittering powder, placed it on a piece of paper on the floor of the children’s room, just to observe it.
He thought it was beautiful, and he had no idea what it was. Leide was fascinated. When her aunt, Luíza Odet, who lived in the back of the house, came to visit, Leide turned off the bedroom light and said with all the innocence in the world: “Auntie, come see the illuminating stone that Daddy brought.”
Luíza recounts that it shone as if it were emitting rays of light. According to her aunt, she never forgot that phrase. But Leide didn’t just stand there watching.
She played with the powder, rubbed it on her hands and body, thought it was some kind of magic stone, and then went to have dinner. She sat at the table, picked up a boiled egg, and ate it with her hands, which were dirty with cesium-137. The radioactive dust, mixed with the moisture from her hand, dripped onto the food as she ate.
This detail, recorded in the preliminary reports, shows the level of contamination to which that child’s body was subjected. She ingested the cesium directly. Hours later, the first symptoms appeared: violent nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness.
For a 6-year-old child, the body simply couldn’t fight against that. And here I need to explain to you what happens when radiation enters the human body, because that’s what killed Leide and all the other victims. When you ingest or have prolonged contact with cesium-137, the ionizing radiation begins to destroy your cells from the inside.
And cesium has a particularly treacherous characteristic. It behaves in the body like potassium, the mineral that cells naturally absorb. So, when you ingest cesium, the body doesn’t reject it; it absorbs it and takes it into the cells.
It’s as if death enters through the front door, invited to join the party. The radiation then attacks the cells that divide the fastest, those in the bone marrow, the digestive system, and the skin. Bone marrow is responsible for producing blood cells, white blood cells that protect you against infections, and platelets that make the blood clot.
When the bone marrow is destroyed, the body is left defenseless and unable to stop bleeding. Imagine that each cell in your body is a factory. It has an instruction manual, the DNA, which tells it exactly what to do, how to divide, how to function.
When ionizing radiation hits a cell, it’s like someone tearing random pages from this manual. If only a few pages are damaged, the factory can improvise. But if too many are destroyed, the factory starts producing the wrong things or simply stops.
It’s a cascading death, a biological domino effect. Leide was admitted to the Marcílio Dias Naval Hospital in Rio de Janeiro, a leading center for the treatment of nuclear accidents. Doctors tried using Prussian blue, a chemical pigment discovered in the early 16th century that acts like a sponge.
It binds to cesium particles within the intestine and helps eliminate them before the body absorbs them. But once the damage is done, once the bone marrow has been destroyed, there is no antidote that can reverse it. Leide’s body was already deeply compromised.
The contamination was so severe that she herself was considered a human source of radiation. The professionals attending to her needed to use special protective equipment just to enter the room. On October 23, 1987, exactly one month after contact with cesium, Leide died from multiple organ hemorrhage.
Her body simply could no longer contain the blood. Every blood vessel, every tissue was compromised by radiation. She was bleeding inside and out, and there was nothing more the doctors could do.
And here comes the part you might not be ready to hear. Leide’s body was still emitting radiation after she was dead. She couldn’t be buried like anyone else.
Her coffin was made of lead and weighed 700 kilograms. It had to be hoisted by a crane to its grave in the Parque de Goiânia cemetery. Even so, more than 2,000 people went to the cemetery to prevent the burial.
They threw stones and bricks, and blocked the entrance with their own bodies. The panic was so great that no one wanted that body near their families, their loved ones. The fear was that the radiation would contaminate the soil, the water, and the entire cemetery.
Mother Lourdes arrived at the wake alone. Her husband Ivo was still hospitalized in Rio de Janeiro, and she, devastated by grief, couldn’t even bring herself to approach her daughter’s coffin at first. Only after the state’s first lady, Sônia Santilho, personally appealed to the angry crowd was Lourdes able to say goodbye.
After the burial, the graves were encased in concrete to prevent any risk of future contamination. Leide was 6 years old. Her mother says that even today, almost 40 years later, she still wakes up wanting to hug her daughter.
“The new house was never complete,” says Lourdes. “Something was always missing, and that was her.” Case two, Maria Gabriela Ferreira, 37 years old.
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Now, let’s continue the story. Maria Gabriela was the wife of Devair, the owner of the junkyard. Ironically, she was the one who saved hundreds of lives, perhaps thousands.
Because it was Maria Gabriela who noticed the connection between the glittering powder and the diseases, and who had the courage to collect that material and take it to the health authorities. But when she did that, on September 29th, it was already too late for her own body.
Maria Gabriela had been exposed to cesium since September 15th, when the dust entered their house. For 14 days, she was in direct contact with the radioactive material. Unbeknownst to her, she slept, ate, and lived next to a source of lethal radiation.
The dust was on the table where she prepared meals, it was in the room where she slept, it was everywhere. Her symptoms followed the same terrible pattern. First, constant nausea and vomiting, then unexplained burns on the skin, clumps of hair falling out, and a dramatic drop in blood cell levels.
Her bone marrow stopped functioning. Without white blood cells, the body became completely vulnerable to any bacteria, any virus. Without platelets, any bleeding, however minor, became potentially fatal.
Acute radiation syndrome has a cruel characteristic. After the initial symptoms, there is a period called the latent phase, during which the patient appears to improve. The vomiting subsides, and the person feels a little better.
This lasts for a few days, sometimes up to two weeks, and the person thinks they are recovering. But in reality, it is during this period that the bone marrow is being silently destroyed. And when the final phase arrives, it arrives with a vengeance.
Uncontrolled infections, internal bleeding, organ failure. Maria Gabriela died on the same day as Leide, October 23, 1987, also at the Marcílio Dias Hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Aunt and niece left on the same day.
They were 37 and 6 years old, respectively. She was buried in the same cemetery, in the same type of 700-kilogram lead coffin, facing the same angry mob that tried to prevent the burial. The woman who saved Goiânia didn’t even get a peaceful burial.
Case three. Israel Batista dos Santos, 22 years old. Israel was an employee at Devair’s junkyard; he was 22 years old.
He was one of those whom Devair asked to dismantle the capsule and remove the lead that protected the radioactive source. Without any protection, without gloves, without a mask, without anything, Israel worked directly with the material for hours. His hands had prolonged contact with cesium-137.
He held, scraped, and manipulated that material with the same ease as someone handling any piece of metal. When the symptoms appeared—nausea, vomiting, burns on his hands and arms—Israel didn’t know what was happening. Nobody knew.
People would go to the doctor and come home with a diagnosis of allergies, food poisoning, anything but the truth. It was only when the alert was raised on September 29th that Israel was referred for treatment. Transferred to Marcílio Dias Hospital, doctors found that the level of contamination was extremely high.
The radiation had already destroyed a large part of his bone marrow. There was no going back now. Israel died on October 27, 1987, four days after Leide and Maria Gabriela.
He was only 22 years old. The official cause was generalized infection, septicemia. Without an immune system, without white blood cells to fight, his body surrendered to bacteria that any healthy person would fight off without even noticing.
An infection that you or I could have treated with a simple antibiotic killed a 22-year-old man because the radiation had disarmed all of his body’s defenses. Case four. Admilson Alves de Souza, 18 years old.
Admilson was the youngest among Devair’s employees. He had just turned 18. He also participated in dismantling the capsule, working side by side with Israel.
Just like Israel, Admilson manipulated the cesium with his bare hands, completely unaware of the danger. And just like Israel, his body began to show signs a few days later. Unexplained burns on his hands, constant nausea, extreme weakness, and a fatigue that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much he rested.
He was transferred to Rio de Janeiro along with the other most seriously injured victims. The doctors tried everything. They administered Prussian blue to try to capture the cesium that was still in the body.
They performed blood transfusions to compensate for what the bone marrow was no longer producing. They used strong antibiotics to fight infections that the body, without defenses, could no longer fight on its own. But the radiation dose that Admilson received was simply too high.
The doctors knew, at that point, that they were racing against time and losing. Admilson died on October 28, 1987, one day after Israel, also from a generalized infection. Two young men, aged 18 and 22, were practically children, who died because they disassembled a piece of metal, unaware that it carried invisible death within it.
And here’s a detail that hurts. In one of the accounts from other hospitalized patients, it is mentioned that even in the hospital, even while dying, some victims were not fully aware of the seriousness of the situation. According to reports from the time, one of the patients was calculating how much money he would receive in compensation while the others prayed.
The radiation killed the body, but the minds of some still clung to life as best they could. Those who died later. These were the four official deaths.
Four people died in October 1987, all from complications of acute radiation syndrome. But the story didn’t end there. And here begins perhaps the most distressing part of all, because radiation doesn’t just kill instantly.
It plants seeds of destruction that take years, sometimes decades, to germinate. And those seeds sprouted in many people. Devair Alves Ferreira, the man who bought the capsule, opened the contents, and distributed the powder to friends and family, believing it to be a precious stone, survived the accident, but he did not survive the guilt.
After the tragedy, Devair sank into alcoholism, became a severe alcoholic, and at the same time, silently, cancer began to develop in his body, fueled by the radiation he carried within him. Devair died in 1994, seven years after the accident. The official cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver, a direct consequence of alcoholism, but when he died, he already had cancer; he was 43 years old.
Guilt destroyed him from the inside as much as the radiation. Ivo Alves Ferreira, the father of little Leide, the one who took the glittering powder home and placed it on the floor of his children’s room, carried the guilt for his daughter’s death for the rest of his life. He fell into a deep and devastating depression.
He started smoking compulsively. Six packs of cigarettes a day. Six. According to Lourdes, his wife, Ivo never forgave himself.
And she never blamed him. “I didn’t blame the two boys who took the part,” she tells the story. “They didn’t know what it was. They were also victims.”
Ivo died in 2003, 16 years after the accident, the cause being pulmonary emphysema. Cigarettes destroyed lungs that radiation had already weakened. He was 52 years old.
And they weren’t the only ones. The Association of Victims of Cesium-137 states that up to 2012, when the accident turned 25 years old, approximately 104 people died as a result of contamination-related illnesses, cancer, lung problems, and organ failure. Radiation planted a time bomb inside each of them, and this bomb detonated one by one over the course of decades.
An estimated 30% of the military police officers who participated in the decontamination operation have since retired due to health problems. Firefighter Sebastião Antônio do Nascimento, who participated in the rescue, also died. Maria das Graças Vieira, a public health inspector who worked at the site where the material was taken, died years later from complications related to the exposure.
And those who survived still bear the scars to this day. Oderson Alves Ferreira, another brother of Devair, became infected because he took five pigs from Ivo’s house to his residence in Aparecida de Goiânia. The pigs were contaminated, the chickens that were nearby were also contaminated, and the eggs that the chickens laid were contaminated.
The contamination spread throughout the entire food chain. But worse still, without knowing he was infected, Oderson worked for eight days as a bus driver, transporting around 1,000 people a day around the city. 8 days, 8,000 people potentially exposed.
When he was admitted to the hospital, doctors had to reconstruct the palm of his hand. He lost part of his index finger, he lost all his fingernails, he lost all the hair on his body, all the skin on his hands, and all the skin around his mouth. Today, almost 40 years later, Oderson has become an activist for victims’ rights and continues to fight because many of them still do not receive the medication and care they are legally entitled to.
More than 1,000 people still receive medical follow-up at the Radiation Accident Assistance Center—1,000 people, almost four decades later. And the pensions that the government promised haven’t been adjusted for years. The radioactive legacy.
And here arises a question that needs to be asked. Who was responsible for all of this? Because that radiotherapy machine didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
It belonged to the Goiano Institute of Radiotherapy. It was abandoned when the clinic moved to a new location in 1985. The clinic owners simply left a radioactive source in a dilapidated building and walked away.
Five people were indicted by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office: the three doctors who owned the clinic, the physicist responsible for the equipment, and the owner of the property. The charges were manslaughter and negligent bodily harm. But we know how the system works, right?
The process dragged on for years, and in the end, the sentences were lenient. The tragedy generated approximately 6,000 tons of radioactive waste. 6,000 tons.
Contaminated clothing, dead animals, contaminated soil, cars. Everything was removed and buried in a special repository built by CNEN in Abadia de Goiás, 20 kilometers from Goiânia. This material is stored in high-strength concrete containers, designed to last at least 300 years.
The time required for the radioactivity of cesium to fall to safe levels is 300 years. To provide context, 300 years ago, in 1726, Brazil was still a colony of Portugal. When this radioactive waste finally ceases to be dangerous, the world will be so different from ours that we can’t even imagine it.
The house of Devair and Maria Gabriela was demolished and turned into radioactive waste. Ivo and Lourdes’ house was demolished; everything those families had built throughout their lives became nuclear waste. Lourdes received a house donated by the government in Aparecida de Goiânia and started over from scratch.
But the new house was never complete. She repeats, she was the one missing. And perhaps the most invisible consequence of all has been prejudice.
As a result of the accident, the people of Goiânia began to be treated with fear and distrust. In other states, people from Goiás were rejected by hotels. Products coming from Goiás were being returned.
The question the victims heard most often was absurd and cruel: “Do you shine?” A stigma that has haunted and continues to haunt hundreds of people who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in front of a blue powder that no one should have encountered. And that leaves the final question.
How was something like this possible? An abandoned radioactive capsule in a dilapidated clinic, unguarded, unmarked, without any protection, waiting there patiently for two years until it was found by someone who had no idea what it was. Six-year-old Leide died because she played with glitter powder and ate an egg with dirty hands.
Maria Gabriela died trying to save the others and was the first to understand what was happening. Israel and Admilson died because they did their job in a junkyard, dismantling what they thought was scrap metal. Devair died consumed by guilt and alcohol.
Ivo died trying to forget the face of his daughter, whom he unintentionally poisoned. And more than 100 people died in the following years, carrying the invisible seeds within their bodies from a radiation that no one warned them existed. The cesium-137 tragedy in Goiânia was not a nuclear accident in the sense that we imagine.
There was no explosion, no mushroom cloud, no sirens. It was something much quieter. It was a blue powder that glowed in the dark, beautiful enough to enchant a child, deadly enough to destroy hundreds of lives, and invisible enough that 16 days could pass without anyone noticing that death was there, shining in the middle of the room.
And that is perhaps the most terrifying lesson of this story. Sometimes, the greatest danger is the one we can’t see, the one that seems harmless, the one that shines. And you, what do you think about this topic?
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
