The two photos here were taken only a couple of months apart in 2004.The man is Victor Yushchenko, a candidate in the Ukranian general election of 2004. The campaign was very bitter and often violent, and Yushchenko became seriously ill in early September 2004. He was flown to a specialist clinic in Vienna and treated for a series of acute internal medical problems, claiming to have been poisoned by government agents.
The real cause of his problem was only discovered after a Dutch toxicologist recognized the symptoms of chloracne (characterised by the pockmarked and bloated nature of his face) while viewing television news coverage of his condition. On December 11, Austrian doctors confirmed that Yushchenko had been poisoned with TCDD dioxin, and had the second highest dioxin level ever recorded in a human.
Dioxins are produced in small concentrations when organic material is burned in the presence of chlorine, whether the chlorine is present as chloride ions or as organochlorine compounds, so they are widely produced in many industrial contexts, but the main problem with them is bioaccumulation in the food chain. The sort of doses found in Yushchenko would have been highly toxic and most likely carcinogenic. Dioxin is widely regarded as the world's most deadly man made chemical (just ahead of sarin) based on LD50 figures(lethal dose 50% - the amount of the chemical needed to account for the death of 50% of a tested population).Despite this major setback to his health, his popularity did not wane, and on January 23, 2005 Yushchenko was inaugurated as the President of Ukraine.
However his bad luck didn't end there. He was struck by a lightening bolt later that year whilst climbing the Ukraine's highest mountain, but again he survived.
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