"My brother fell in love with the light of death": the story of the radiation accident that shook Brazil

"From a tiny hole in one part of the device came a mesmerising, deeply alluring light." When word spread of the strange blue-glowing capsule in Devair Ferreira's scrapyard in Goiania, Brazil, neighbours, family and friends gathered to see it.

Some held the small, glittering fragments in their hands; others took them home. No one knew they were handling highly radioactive Cesium-137, or that it was about to cause Brazil's worst radiation accident.

Devair had bought the capsule days earlier from two scrap collectors who found it in an abandoned hospital. His brother Odeson, thinking it useless, urged him to throw it away. But Devair, captivated by the glow, even thought it would make a beautiful gemstone for a ring for his wife. He said later, "It was the light of death that I fell in love with."

A week later many people developed mysterious health problems. Someone close to the family connected the illnesses to the capsule's arrival, and Devair's wife Maria Gabriela took it to a hospital, where it sat on a chair all day. The next day a doctor tested it with a radiation detector; the reading was so high he first thought the instrument faulty, but a second confirmed it. "The material you touched is radioactive; seek help immediately," they were told. By then, 56 members of Odeson's extended family had been exposed.

Tragically, the first to die was Odeson's six-year-old niece Leide. Her father had brought a fragment home in a matchbox; when the lights were turned off to show its glow, Leide played with it. Eating with the hands that had touched the radioactive material cost her life.

Even after being declared free of contamination, Odeson was isolated in hospital. People feared the sight of him; bus passengers who recognised him got off at once, he recalls, and a bar owner threw away with a napkin the tumbler he had drunk from. Part of his family home was demolished because of contamination. The memory of the accident remains vivid in Brazil.