PDF copy of 2009 book

2The basic conclusion of the report’s medical volume is that 9,000 victims died ordeveloped radiogenic cancers, but given the background of spontaneous cancers, “itwill be difficult to determine the exact cause of the deaths.” Some 4,000 children wereoperated on for thyroid cancer. In the contaminated areas, cataracts were increasinglyseen in liquidators and children. Some believe that poverty, feelings of victimization, andfatalism, which are widespread among the population of the contaminated areas, aremore dangerous than the radioactive contamination. Those experts, some of whom wereassociated with the nuclear industry, concluded that as a whole, the adverse consequencesfor the health of the people were not as significant as previously thought.An opposing position was voiced by Secretary-General Kofi Annan:Chernobyl is a word we would all like to erase from our memory. But more than seven million of ourfellow human beings do not have the luxury of forgetting. They are still suffering, everyday, as a resultof what happened ...The exact number of victims can never be known. But three million childrendemanding treatment until 2016 and earlier represents the number of those who can be seriouslyill ...their future life will be deformed by it, as well as their childhood. Many will die prematurely.(AP, 2000)No fewer than three billion persons inhabit areas contaminated by Chernobyl’s radionuclides.More than 50% of the surface of 13 European countries and 30% of eightother countries have been contaminated by Chernobyl fallout (Chapter I.1). Given biologicaland statistical laws the adverse effects in these areas will be apparent for manygenerations.Soon after the catastrophe, concerned doctors observed a significant increase in diseasesin the contaminated areas and demanded help. The experts involved with thenuclear industry and highly placed tribunals declared that there is no “statistically authentic”proof of Chernobyl radiation, but in the 10 years immediately following thecatastrophe, official documents recognized that the number of thyroid cancers grew “unexpectedly.”Prior to 1985 more than 80% of children in the Chernobyl territories ofBelarus, Ukraine, and European Russia were healthy; today fewer than 20% are well. Inthe heavily contaminated areas it is difficult to find one healthy child (Chapter II.4).We believe it is unreasonable to attribute the increased occurrence of disease in thecontaminated territories to screening or socioeconomic factors because the only variableis radioactive loading. Among the terrible consequences of Chernobyl radiation aremalignant neoplasms and brain damage, especially during intrauterine development(Chapter II.6).Why are the assessments of experts so different?There are several reasons, including that some experts believe that any conclusionsabout radiation-based disease requires a correlation between an illness and the receiveddose of radioactivity. We believe this is an impossibility because no measurements weretaken in the first few days. Initial levels could have been a thousand times higher thanthe ones ultimately measured several weeks and months later. It is also impossible tocalculate variable and “hot spot” deposition of nuclides or to measure the contributionof all of the isotopes, such as Cs, I, Sr, Pu, and others, or to measure the kinds and totalamount of radionuclides that a particular individual ingested from food and water.A second reason is that some experts believe the only way to make conclusions is tocalculate the effect of radiation based upon the total radiation, as was done for thoseexposed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the first 4 years after the atomic bombs weredropped on Japan, research was forbidden. During that time more than 100,000 of the