Tourists getting poisoned can’t be good news the the Moscow Convention and Visitors Bureau, if there is one. Two women somehow ingested thallium in Moscow shortly after arriving from California. The colorless and odorless metal causes many symptoms similar to radiation poisoning.
Now, I’ve been to Russia three times — the first time in 1990 with Durham’s first big Sister Cities delegation — and I fell in love with the country. But every time I went there — ’90, ’92 and ’96 — I wished I had had my appendix taken out sometime during my life. I didn’t relish time in a Soviet (and later Russian) hospital. “Hang in there, appendix, only x more days,” I would think to myself each night.
Now it seems that even the food one eats is suspect. I hate that for Russia. The two women who were poisoned were recent Russian emigres to the U.S., so maybe this wasn’t just a random poisoning. But, for the life of me, I can’t see a motive for poisoning a doctor and her daughter who are just vacationing in the Motherland.
