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Mexican police block hospital on radiation fears

338597_Mexico-Hueypoxtla

Mexican police have blocked access to a hospital in the central state of Hidalgo where six people have been admitted for radiation exposure.

An official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that the people were admitted to the hospital, which is located in the city of Pachuca.

Two people were admitted on Thursday and four others on Friday for radiation poisoning, which could have come from a stolen radioactive cargo of cobalt-60.

It was not clear whether the six people were the thieves who stole the cargo truck at gunpoint from a gas station in Hidalgo on Monday.

Mexican authorities said on Thursday that the radioactive cobalt-60 source was abandoned on Wednesday on a field in a rural area about a kilometer from Hueypoxtla, an agricultural town of about 40,000 people, and potentially contaminated a family.

The authorities stated that the radioactive material had been removed from its container, adding that anyone who opened the consignment could die within days.

Mexico’s National Commission for Nuclear Safety and Safeguards (CNSNS) said the family was near the radioactive material.

“We will have to keep this family under medical watch for the sole reason of being near a certain distance from the source,” said CNSNS operations director Mardonio Jimenez, without specifying how many people were in the family.

He added that it was the first time that such material was stolen and taken out from its container.

“The person or people who this took out are in very great risk of dying,” Jimenez predicted.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mexican authorities notified the IAEA that a truck transporting a “dangerous radioactive source” used for medical treatment was “stolen” on Monday.

The IAEA said that the material was “extremely dangerous” if removed from its shielding while experts said the 60 grams of cobalt-60 inside it was enough to manufacture a “dirty bomb”.

The UN agency said that the 60 grams of material “would be likely to cause permanent injury to a person who handled it or who was otherwise in contact with it for more than a few minutes.”

“It would probably be fatal to be close to this amount of unshielded radioactive material for a period in the range of a few minutes to an hour,” it said

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