April 6, 2005 Yushchenko's Gambit Revisiting the "Orange Revolution"
by Justin Raimondo ---snip
Yushchenko firmly believes he was poisoned by agents of the former regime, and appears to be buying into the absurd Pavlovsky tapes, which are pretty much agreed by all but his Prosecutor Piskun to be bogus. The Ukrainian president points to a preelection dinner with the head of Ukraine's secret services, and hosted by Volodymyr Satsyuk, the No. 2 official, as the genesis of his medical problems, but dioxin – the poison that was supposedly put in his food – takes at least three days to produce any effects, and Yushchenko was ill the next morning. The Knight Ridder piece cites the expert opinion of Dr. Arnold Schecter, a leading authority on dioxin at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas, who questions this key part of Yushchenko's story. The symptoms showed up too speedily for the dinner at Satsyuk's dacha to have been the site of the poisoning:
---snip
Then there are the assertions from Yushchenko's entourage that the Ukrainian president is healing, and that his face will soon return to near-normal – an astonishing assertion, given the long-lasting effects of dioxin, which is stored in body fat and even seeps into cell nuclei.
Adding yet more murk to the mystery, we have Dr. Lothar Wicke, the former medical director of the Rudolfinerhaus clinic where Yushchenko went for treatment, popping up again with claims that throw the whole affair into serious doubt:
"A senior doctor ousted from the Vienna clinic where Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president, was treated for dioxin poisoning, claims that his life was threatened after he cast doubt on the diagnosis.
---snip
"Dr. Wicke told The Telegraph that, as the crime writer Agatha Christie liked to point out, there was 'no murder without a corpse, and no poisoning without poison.' …
---snip
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5471-------------------
There's a lot more in this article on the geopolitical aspect of the Ukraine elections, but I wanted to highlight the dioxin controversy. It's a new one on me.
Note: I changed the title and quotes because the supporting article from Knight-Ridder doesn't really claim that the poisoning was a fake.