CREEPY BUT COOL (16): Vomit, Warts and The Runs Saved Poisoned Ukranian Pres. Victor Yushchenko

It’s been almost five years since Ukranian president Victor Yushchenko was mysteriously poisoned in Kiev when an unknown bad guy laced his soup with massive quantities of the chemical dioxin.

But only now are we finally getting to learn what exactly happened to the guy’s face and body.

And it is quite a story.

First, dude was seriously poisoned — so much so that his blood contained 50,000 times the normal amounts of dioxin found in the human body.

It was a fatal dose — but Yushchenko is still with us thanks to some quick (and kinda gross) intervention. As we learn in a report just published in the British medical journal The Lancet, lots of vomitting and some hard-core diarrhea helped flush the dioxin out of Yushchenko’s system and keep him alive.

But not, as the pics above show, before the poison took an awful toll on the President’s face. Yet those warts and skin growths actually helped prevent Yushchenko’s death, it seems — by isolating the poison on his skin and keeping it away from his vital organs.

Crafty!

“The skin can be regarded as a detoxifying agent,” says Yushchenko’s Swiss doctor Jean Saurat at the Swiss Centre for Human Applied Toxicology, where the Pres. was treated.

Another unusual element of Yushchenko’s treatment included popular anti-obesity medications (yes, fat-busters) such as olestra — the same stuff used in those nasty reduced-calorie potato chips that cause “anal leakage” (you know the type).

As an anti-fat agent, Olestra was used to help flush dioxin — which is stored in fat — out of Yushchenko’s system (hence, we suspect, that diarrhea).

Anyway, despite his near-death poisoning, Yushchenko is quite alive and well — and from the photo above, looking much, much better. And doctors say that roughly half of the poison was out of his system within a year and one-half, far quicker than they anticiapted.

Yushchenko’s attack was horrific and tragic, but we think his totally creepy-but-cool tales is perhaps the most itriguing political story of the 21st century.