A Hospital Left Behind
In September 1987, a radiotherapy unit sat abandoned in a partially demolished building in Goiânia, Brazil. Ownership of the site was tangled in legal disputes, and the device that once treated cancer patients was ignored.
Inside it was a capsule of caesium chloride made with caesium 137. It held enough activity to deliver a dangerous dose within minutes. For almost two years it remained in place, though officials had been warned that leaving it there was risky.
The Theft and the Blue Glow
On September 13, two men entered the old clinic to collect scrap metal. They wheeled the source assembly away, unaware that the shiny steel and lead container held intense gamma radiation. They began to dismantle it at a private home.
Both soon suffered vomiting, swollen hands, and burns that matched the shape of the capsule’s opening. Days later, one of the men punctured the window of the capsule and saw a deep blue light. He scooped out grains of glowing material and tried to ignite them with a match, thinking it might be gunpowder. The substance did not burn.
On September 18, the assembly and the punctured capsule were sold to a scrapyard. The owner, Devair Alves Ferreira, saw the blue glow and carried the capsule into his house. Friends and relatives visited to admire it. Children held grains the size of rice. Some rubbed the glowing dust on their skin.
Illness and Discovery
Symptoms appeared within days. Nausea, hair loss, swelling, and skin burns began to strike people connected to the scrapyard. One girl, six year old Leide das Neves Ferreira, sat on a floor where particles had collected. She later ate food in the same spot and showed the dust to her family.
Her dose was fatal. On September 28, Devair’s wife, Maria Gabriela, retrieved the material from a rival scrapyard and brought it to a hospital. The next morning a visiting medical physicist used a scintillation counter to identify radioactivity. By the end of the day, local and national authorities were mobilized.
Cleanup and Aftermath
Nearly 130,000 residents sought testing. Two hundred forty nine people were found to have contamination on or inside their bodies. Twenty required intensive treatment and four died within weeks. Topsoil was removed from yards.
Houses were demolished. Personal belongings from contaminated homes were examined and, if radioactive, destroyed. Vacuum machines, chemical washes, and Prussian blue were used to reduce exposure. Buses, cars, livestock, and even rolls of toilet paper were scanned.
Investigators recovered most of the caesium. A portion remained in the environment, slowly decaying over the decades. Legal cases followed, and compensation was ordered for long term monitoring and treatment. The events of 1987 remain one of the most significant radiological accidents recorded by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In 1987 in Goiania, Brazil, two men pried open an abandoned medical device and found a blue glowing powder.
They carried it home, passing it around as a curiosity, unaware they were handling powerful radioactivity that could kill with only tiny grains…🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/e0WWnnwm8Y
— Fascinating True Stories (@FascinatingTrue) November 4, 2025