On the medical front: Kyiv pediatric hospital helps Chornobyl's children (05/12/96)

On the medical front: Kyiv pediatric hospital helps Chornobyl's children

by Marta Kolomayets
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The debate is ongoing as to how many people were affected by the nuclear explosion at the Chornobyl power plant and what the consequences - both physical and psychological - are of the accident, that 10 years ago spewed radioactive particles over more than 82,000 square kilometers of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Some doctors say the official number of victims of Chornobyl is 31 - the people who died immediately after the accident, including the firefighters who rushed to the scene on April 26, 1986. Other scientists, who attended the recent conference on the radiological consequences of the Chornobyl accident, jointly sponsored by the European Commission and the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian governments, report that only 45 deaths are attributable to the 1986 accident. Even the Ukrainian government has offered three different figures for deaths in Ukraine, including 125,000, 148,000 and 167,653, over the last year.

Ukrainian authorities say that more than 3.5 million people were exposed to the accident's radioactive release, which they estimate was 500 times that of Hiroshima.

Among those millions were 700,000 children, who were exposed to vaying degrees of radiation and face certain health risks.

No one has conclusively proven that a weakened immune system and various forms of cancer (such as liver and rectal cancer in children), as well as variety of birth defects among newborns, can be directly linked to the 1986 Chornobyl accident. But there have been no disputes among doctors that childhood thyroid cancers - which have increased markedly in the contaminated zone in the last 10 years - are related to the explosion.

"We are seeing a weakening of the immune system in children," said Dr. Oleksander Urin, the director of the Okhmadyt Hospital (Okhorony Materi iy Dytyny - Health Protection of the Mother and Child), the main children's hospital in Kyiv.

"Children are getting sick not only more often, but also for a longer time," he said, adding that he also believes the consequences of the accident will be even more pronounced in the generations to follow.

"The rate of birth defects among newborns in my hospital has more than doubled," he noted. In the last two weeks, he observed, two babies were born at the hospital to Chornobyl zone evacuees, who were children at the time of the accident. "And both have birth defects," he said.

He explained that, fortunately, both could be surgically corrected. The Sushko baby girl's esophagus was not connected at one end, making it impossible for her to receive nourishment orally. The baby had surgery and was reported to be doing well.

But the Shramuk baby girl, the couple's second child, was not as lucky. Born on March 15 with tracheo-esophagal problems also, she had other birth defects, including six fingers on her left hand and deformed ear lobes. (Their first born in 1995 was two months premature, weighed less than 3 pounds at birth and lived only a few days.) The baby's father was 14 and lived in Chornobyl at the time of the accident. Nurses at the hospital said that the family had begun talking about giving up their second baby.

Dr. Urin added that although the rate of childhood leukemia has not increased, children now seem to suffer from liver and rectal cancer, malignancies not commonly seem in the very young.

"These are isolated cases so far, but they are warning signals about what may follow," said Dr. Urin, who has seen 8,401 children who are considered "Chornobyl children" - meaning that they were evacuated from contaminated regions, or they are children of evacuatees from the zone.

"And only 24 percent of these children can be given a clean bill of health," he added. "The rest have various kinds of ailments, some more serious than others."

Thyroid cancer is one of the diseases that affects these children," added Natalia Savelyeva, the deputy head of the Chornobyl division at the Ministry of Health, showing tables of statistics pointing to the increases in thyroid cancer.

A substantial increase in reported cases of thyroid cancer, especially in young children, has been generally attributed to exposure to radioactive iodine during the early phases of the accident in 1986. Up to the end of 1995, a total of 800 cases was reported in children who were under the age of 15 at the time of the diagnosis. To date, three children have died of thyroid cancer.

If children from the zone, or children of those from the zone are monitored closely throughout their lives, doctors are optimistic that they can be cured, since treatment of cases caught early is generally successful.

"We had less than 10 documented cases a year prior to 1986, and now that has increased sixfold," added Ms. Savelyeva.

At his hospital, Dr. Urin has noticed that the occurrence of thyroid cancer has increased 3.6 percent in the last decade.

A study on "Thyroid Cancer in Children and Adolescents in Ukraine after the Chornobyl Accident (1986-1995)", presented by a team of researchers from the Institute of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine, whose findings were presented at the Miensk conference, confirms what doctors have found.

Comparing their study to a British study that monitored British adolescents, they found that cases of thyroid carcinoma in Ukrainian children were seven times more common in the last decade. It also showed that Ukrainian tumors differ from thyroid cancer in children in the United Kingdom in that they are more common in younger children and in boys.

The nine-year study by the Ukrainian researchers also concluded that the increase in thyroid cancer is probably due to radiation, since more than 60 percent of all cases have been registered in the five regions that had the most fallout after the accident out of a total of 25 regions.

Recently, Margaret Shapiro of The Washington Post reported that the increase in thyroid cancer among children in Belarus was so high that international experts, initially skeptical about post-Chornobyl health claims in Ukraine and Belarus, now acknowledge that it can be explained only by the radiation from the Chornobyl accident.

And, at the international conference held in Vienna in April on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Chornobyl accident, Dr. Angela Merkel, Germany's minister for the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety, stated the following:

"With respect to the more long-term effects on health, we must look into the question as to whether the number of cases of thyroid cancer in children which has been constantly increasing since 1990 - to date more than 600 cases have been identified - is, in addition to the immediate consequences, the only effect which can be proven to be directly attributed to radiation exposure. We are horrified to see that it is children above all who must suffer. Even more, the type of thyroid cancer is very aggressive, and we must ask ourselves whether the otherwise excellent chances of cure for thyroid cancer also apply here."

| Home Page |