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Chernobyl's Radiation Effects Less Severe Than Feared

Posted on: Wednesday, 7 September 2005, 09:00 CDT

Nearly 20 years after the huge nuclear accident at Chernobyl, a new scientific report has found that its effects on health and the environment were significantly less severe than scientists initially predicted. In light of the findings, says the report that was made public Monday, compensation programs for millions of people classified as Chernobyl victims should be scaled back in Ukraine, where the accident occurred, and in neighboring Belarus and Russia.

The programs, the report says, have fostered a culture of dependency, creating "a major barrier to the region's recovery."

According to the report, written by a panel of more than 100 experts convened by United Nations agencies, 4,000 deaths will probably be attributable ultimately to the accident. This is a large number, but fewer than the tens of thousands of deaths that were predicted at the time.

Fewer than 50 deaths, all among reactor staff and emergency personnel, can be directly attributed to acute radiation exposure after the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and burned on April 26, 1986, the report said. The remainder will largely be due to cancers in people exposed to radiation near Chernobyl, about 110 kilometers, or 70 miles, north of Kiev, near Ukraine's border with Belarus.

But for millions of other people in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine who were exposed to radioactive particles spread by the wind, health damage has proved generally minimal, the report said.

Likewise, despite previous forecasts, there has been no observed rise in the incidence of leukemia, a blood cancer widely associated with radiation exposure, except perhaps a small rise among workers who were in the plant.

Nor has there been any detectable decrease in fertility or increase in birth defects, said the report, written for the Chernobyl Forum, a group that includes the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, six other UN agencies and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

"The largest public health problem unleashed by the accident," the report concludes, is "the mental health impact." Many residents of the region, who view themselves as victims of a tragedy they poorly understand, are still beset by anxiety that has prevented them from restarting their lives. "People have developed a paralyzing fatalism because they think they are at much higher risk than they are, so that leads to things like drugs and alcohol use, and unprotected sex and unemployment," said Dr. Fred Mettler, health effect team leader of the Chernobyl Forum.

The main concrete health effect has been an outbreak of thyroid cancer in people who were young at the time of the accident and drank contaminated milk. Although 2,000 have come down with the disease, only nine have died because the disease is generally treatable.

"Early on there were all sorts of claims being made because people didn't have much accurate information," Mettler said. "Now, at last, we have the eight UN agencies and the three governments involved coming to a consensus about the effects and what needs to be done."

Seven million people in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus still receive some kind of Chernobyl benefits, from monthly stipends to university entrance preference to free therapeutic yearly vacations.

In Ukraine, the number of people designated as permanently disabled by the Chernobyl accident and their children increased from 200 in 1991 to 64,500 in 1997 and 91,219 in 2001 even though, the report noted, the effects of radiation decline over time. Both Ukraine and Belarus still spend about 5 percent of their annual budgets on Chernobyl victims.

Although five million people live in areas classified as contaminated by Chernobyl, the vast majority are exposed to very low doses of radiation, with levels no higher than in large areas of China, Brazil or Britain, where naturally occurring background radiation in soil is relatively high. "People were evacuated from areas that now have dose levels lower than where I live in New Mexico," said Mettler, an expert on the health effects of nuclear radiation at the University of New Mexico in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Although there is still a strong stigma against growing or eating agricultural products from anywhere in the area, concentrations of radioactivity "in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international action levels," the report found. The report acknowledged that there was a core of people, probably numbering 100,000 to 200,000, who continued to be severely affected by the disaster. These are poor rural dwellers who live in the few severely contaminated areas, the people with thyroid cancer and citizens who were resettled after the disaster but never found a home or employment in their new communities. "A small but important minority, those caught in the downward spiral, need substantial material assistance to rebuild their lives," the report said. This might include helping farmers to decontaminate their fields in high- risk areas and providing clean feed for their animals.

But for the millions of others classified as victims, the first priority should be to encourage self-reliance to "normalize their lives as quickly and as far as is possible," the report said by providing them with realistic information about the minimal risks they face. Noting that the collapse of the Soviet Union since the accident and the end of Soviet-era benefit programs had exacerbated the poverty of the region, the researchers concluded that residents should now be provided with incentives to develop small businesses, for example.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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