Polonium subjects were chosen because experimenters wanted persons who had not been exposed to polonium either through work or accident. All subjects had incurable diseases. Excretion of polonium was followed, and an autopsy was conducted at that time on the deceased patient to determine which organs absorbed the polonium. Patients' ages ranged from 'early thirties' to 'early forties'. The experiments were described in Chapter 3 of Biological Studies with Polonium, Radium, and Plutonium, National Nuclear Energy Series, Volume VI-3, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1950. Not specified is the isotope under study, but at the time polonium-210 was the most readily available polonium
Polonium Prof. Nick Priest of Middlesex University, an environmental toxicologist and radiation expert, speaking on Sky News on December 3, 2006, Litvinenko was probably the first person to die of the acute α-radiation effects of Po. Abnormally high concentrations of Po were detected in July 2012 in clothes and personal belongings of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a heavy smoker, who died on 11 November 2004 of uncertain causes. The spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, where those items were analyzed, stressed that the "clinical symptoms described in Arafat's medical reports were not consistent with polonium-210 and that