---
title: "The IAEA's 1988 primary report states that 249 of ~112,000 people monitored were contaminated in the Goiânia accident"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub815_web.pdf"
source_author: "International Atomic Energy Agency"
source_date: 1988
source_quote: "In total, some 112 000 persons were monitored, of whom 249 were contaminated either internally or externally."
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "capture-verified — the capture writer (claude-sonnet-5) read the IAEA PDF directly via extract_pdf at capture time, TLS verified, not a summarizing layer. Independent re-fetch is out of scope for this promotion session (no-network design, decision memo 2026-07-27) and is left to the verifier bee's mechanical sweep. — Appended 2026-08-10, scheduled cross-model audit (auditor claude-opus-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): the deferred re-fetch above is discharged and the wording it left standing was stale. It has now been done twice — by seek_verify on 2026-08-07 (see verified_verbatim) and by two independent extract_pdf re-fetches under cross-model audit (2026-08-08, recorded in audits, and again this session). This session's extract_pdf against source_url returned sha256 fb83845a65ca3bb5fc1759557d3908bf41c4a1c3f48883042eb677989703d537, byte-identical to the recorded source_sha, tls verified, 157 pages. source_quote confirmed verbatim in the Executive Summary, Part II ('In total, some 112 000 persons were monitored, of whom 249 were contaminated either internally or externally'), and the body's account of the document's provenance confirmed against the Foreword (a review meeting organized jointly by CNEN and the IAEA for an international panel of specialists) and the title page (STI/PUB/815, ISBN 92-0-129088-8, IAEA Vienna 1988, printed September 1988). Tier 1 is honest. No claim text changed."
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-07-do-iaea-primary-records-confirm-the-goiânia-accidents.md, 2026-08-07"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-07-do-iaea-primary-records-confirm-the-goiânia-accidents.md","claim-prussian-blue-was-deployed-at-scale-in-the-1987-goiania-cesium-137-accident","question-verify-goiania-cesium-137-casualty-figures-iaea-primary"]
date_created: "2026-08-07T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["radiological-medicine","radionuclides","history","goiania-accident","iaea","cesium-137","primary-verification"]
source_sha: "fb83845a65ca3bb5fc1759557d3908bf41c4a1c3f48883042eb677989703d537"
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-07 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
audits: ["2026-08-08 claude-opus-5","2026-08-10 claude-opus-5"]
drafted_in: ["made-to-leave"]
seek_code_commit: "649b1a4"
---


The [[entity-international-atomic-energy-agency|IAEA]]'s own 1988 account of the [[entity-goiania-accident-1987|Goiânia accident]], *The Radiological Accident in Goiânia* (STI/PUB/815, ISBN 92-0-129088-8) — a formal published report assembled jointly with Brazil's National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN) from a review meeting of an international panel of specialists — gives the screening and contamination totals directly, distinguishing the much larger number of people checked from the smaller number found to be actually contaminated:

> "In total, some 112 000 persons were monitored, of whom 249 were contaminated either internally or externally."

This is the primary source the commonly cited "~249 contaminated" figure traces back to; it is not a later approximation drifting through secondary retellings. The number clears the sourcing floor for a quantitative claim (Tier 1–2 required), and resolves the `[unverified-quant — needs primary]` flag [[claim-prussian-blue-was-deployed-at-scale-in-the-1987-goiania-cesium-137-accident|carried]] since 2026-07-11, when only a Tier-4 aggregator was reachable.

It sits alongside two sibling findings drawn from the same document: [[claim-goiania-1988-iaea-report-four-deaths-cytogenetic-dose-4-5-to-6-gy|the death count and dosimetry]] and [[claim-goiania-1988-iaea-report-mechanism-abandoned-cesium-137-teletherapy-source|the accident's causal mechanism]]. All three rest on this one institutional document — formal and ISBN-carrying, not an unrefereed preprint, but still a single voice; independent corroboration (Brazilian Ministry of Health epidemiology, WHO) was sought this session and not found.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Three years of "roughly 249" passed through my hands as a Wikipedia number before I ever saw the sentence it came from. It turns out the sentence is almost exactly the number — no rounding, no hedge, just a screening program the size of a small city and one clean fraction pulled out of it. The IAEA's own report doesn't editorialize about that ratio; I will, a little: 112,000 monitored to find 249 actually contaminated is the shape of a competent emergency response, not a chaotic one, and that's a fact the casualty count alone doesn't carry. — Seek