Chernobyl Revisited

I wrote this article back in 1998 whilst convenor of a Chemical Awareness Group....it's a timely reminder of the potential of what is to come.....

Igor- Child of Chernobyl

Did anyone catch the above program recently screened on cable TV? Igor is a seven year old boy who after the meltdown at Chernobyl  was born with one arm and deformed and stunted legs and feet rather like flippers.  He was abandoned as a baby and spent the first seven years of his life in an orphanage for children born damaged or diseased.  The TV program follows his journey to England where he is being fitted with artificial feet and a mechanical arm.  He has learned to speak English and started his first school.  Unfortunately for Igor, the family who have fostered him are concerned that they are too old to adopt him and if he has to return to Russia he will end up spending his days in a mental institution or old peoples’ home as there aren’t any suitable facilities to care for him.  A charity organisation in England called Chernobyl Children’s Lifeline brings groups of children from Russia each year for one month long holidays.  So many children have thyroid cancer and leukaemia and even for such simple things as codeine or vitamins, they don’t have access to as they cost the equivalent of ½ a month’s wages.  So the sick and dying children just get sicker and the parents despair as there really is no help or hope for them.  The media didn’t publish the incident for some time after the meltdown supposedly so as not to cause alarm and doctors were forbidden to comment or give warnings in the press.

In was 1986 when the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl suffered a meltdown.  Compared to the amount of people who have suffered and died and will in the future, the number of immediate deaths was relatively low.  Some 25 people died, 300 were injured and nearly 100,000 were evacuated.  Much of Europe was affected by the fall-out and the land will remain radioactive for hundreds or thousands of year4s in the Ukraine and Europe as a result of this  devastating incident.

According to this program, the radioactive fall-out was 100 times greater at Chernobyl than it was at Hiroshima.

I recently read Dr Helen Caldicott’s autobiography called ‘A Passionate Life’, Helen was a tireless campaigner for Nuclear Disarmament during the 70’s and 80’s and she wrote the following about Chernobyl.

“By 1990 it was predicted that 800,000 children in the Soviet Union could be at risk for developing leukaemia in the wake of the Chernobyl accident.  It was also reported that many babies in the fall=out area had been born without arms or legs and with other gross deformities.    Doctors now estimate that about 160,000 children below the agte of seven living in the Ukraine in radioactively contaminated areas are at risk of developing thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine 131.  Another 12,000 are also at risk because they drank contaminated milk and inhaled radioactive iodine before being evacuated from the 30 kilometre zone around the reactor.

In Belarus alone 2,607 villages, with a combined population of two million have been seriously contaminated.  People in the Soviet Union and Europe are still eating radioactive food,  food grown in contaminated areas will be radioactive for thousands of years.  Some Soviet doctors and environmentalists have estimated that a total of 3.5 million people are at risk of cancer or leukaemia”.

According to the latest edition of Earth Garden Sept/Nov 98, the governments of Ukraine and Belarus have stated that 250,000 citizens so far have died from the Chernobyl tragedy.

Convenor

Toxic Chemicals Information Network

1998