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Goiânia accident is drawing 59x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

Goiânia accident drew 114,263 views on 2026-10-06, 59x more than the usual 1,949 a day over the previous 60 days.

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Goiânia accident

1987 radioactive contamination incident in Brazil

59x
114,263 views
usually 1,949 a day
Daily Wikipedia pageviews for Goiânia accident050K100K150K200K114,26323 Aug14 Sep6 Oct
Wikipedia pageviews, 6 Oct 2026 wikispikes.com
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Daily Wikipedia pageviews for Goiânia accident
DateViews
2026-10-06114,263
2026-10-051,278
2026-10-041,446
2026-10-031,531
2026-10-021,569
2026-10-012,094
2026-09-302,059
2026-09-291,434
2026-09-281,452
2026-09-271,155
2026-09-261,084
2026-09-251,053
2026-09-241,203
2026-09-231,667
2026-09-221,263
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2026-09-121,340
2026-09-111,319
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2026-09-099,295
2026-09-081,287
2026-09-071,538
2026-09-062,045
2026-09-051,619
2026-09-047,491
2026-09-031,564
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2026-08-281,710
2026-08-271,940
2026-08-262,301
2026-08-252,807
2026-08-242,907
2026-08-233,817

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What this article is

The Goiânia accident, also known locally as the caesium-137 accident/caesium-137 Goiânia, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after an unsecured radiotherapy source, inside a lead-and-steel medical device, was found by scavenger thieves at an abandoned hospital site in the city. The thieves, and then workers at the scrapyard owned by Devair Ferreira, who bought the device from the thieves, used tools to open the device and expose the caesium-137 crystals. Ferreira brought the exposed caesium-137 crystals to his home, sharing them with his family and neighbours; the caesium-137 crystals were subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths – two of Ferreira's family members and two of his scrapyard employees. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Goiânia accident", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.

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