Health Protection Agency (HPA Web site)

At the beginning of November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy living in London, was poisoned and died in a London hospital three weeks later, becoming the first known victim of Polonium‐210‐induced acute radiation syndrome. Clearly a murder by radiation poisoning was a matter of considerable public alarm. It seemed that, almost hourly, spokespersons from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) were appearing on UK TV giving the latest updates. I suspect that this was the first that the majority of the British public heard of the Health Protection Agency, which had been established on 1 April 2005 as a...