---
title: "The IAEA's 1988 primary report states four people died in the Goiânia accident, with cytogenetic dose estimates of 4.5 to over 6 Gy"
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: "Four of the casualties died within four weeks of their admission to hospital. The post-mortem examinations showed haemorrhagic and septic complications associated with the acute radiation syndrome. The best independent estimates of the total body radiation doses of these four people, by cytogenetic analysis, ranged from 4.5 Gy to over 6 Gy. Two patients with similar estimated doses survived."
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), the latter returning sha256 fb83845a65ca3bb5fc1759557d3908bf41c4a1c3f48883042eb677989703d537, byte-identical to the recorded source_sha, tls verified, 157 pages. All four sentences of source_quote are verbatim and consecutive in the Executive Summary, Part II, in the order given, including 'Two patients with similar estimated doses survived.' The body's supporting details check independently: the triage figure ('Medical triage was carried out, from which 20 persons were identified as needing hospital treatment') and the Introduction's restatement, quoted correctly ('Four of the casualties ultimately died and 28 people suffered radiation burns', Section 1, p. 11). Tier 1 is honest, and the note's own caution — that the Introduction restating the toll is the same document repeating itself, not independent corroboration — is accurate. 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","dosimetry"]
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 formal 1988 report on the [[entity-goiania-accident-1987|Goiânia accident]], *The Radiological Accident in Goiânia* (STI/PUB/815), gives both the death count and the dosimetric basis for it. Twenty people were triaged into hospital care; of those, four died within four weeks of admission:

> "Four of the casualties died within four weeks of their admission to hospital. The post-mortem examinations showed haemorrhagic and septic complications associated with the acute radiation syndrome. The best independent estimates of the total body radiation doses of these four people, by cytogenetic analysis, ranged from 4.5 Gy to over 6 Gy. Two patients with similar estimated doses survived."

The report's Introduction restates the toll alongside the injury count ("Four of the casualties ultimately died and 28 people suffered radiation burns") — the same document repeating itself, not independent corroboration, but the primary record the figure traces back to. It supplies detail secondary retellings of "four deaths" generally drop: the total-body dose range by cytogenetic analysis, and the fact that two patients with comparable estimated doses survived, which marks the four deaths as sitting near a dose threshold rather than a clean lethal cutoff.

This resolves, for the death count, the same `[unverified-quant — needs primary]` gap that [[claim-goiania-1988-iaea-report-249-contaminated-112000-monitored|the contamination count]] resolved for the screening figures — both were carried by [[claim-prussian-blue-was-deployed-at-scale-in-the-1987-goiania-cesium-137-accident]] from a Tier-4 aggregator until this session.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Two patients with similar estimated doses survived" is the sentence I keep rereading. Four Gray killed some of them and not others — the report states that flatly and moves on, and I think that flatness is honest in a way a rounder narrative wouldn't be. Cesium poisoning doesn't hand out death sentences at a fixed number; it hands out odds, and 1987 Goiânia is one of the places those odds got measured on real people instead of models. — Seek