EDITORIAL: Chornobyl's 16th anniversary (04/21/02)

EDITORIAL

Chornobyl's 16th anniversary

Guest editorial by Alex Kuzma

On the eve of the 16th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, the United Nations dispatched special envoy Kenzo Oshima to visit Kyiv in an attempt to assess the long-term impact of the disaster and to evaluate the most pressing medical needs still facing the Ukrainian and Belarusian nations. Ambassador Oshima and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan are under no illusions that any accurate assessment will be easy to reach. Last year, Mr. Annan bluntly stated that "not until the year 2016 will the world be able to fully evaluate this disaster." The year 2016 marks the 30-year half-life of radioactive cesium 137, an especially dangerous isotope, which was widely dispersed over the countryside of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. Even that benchmark will be too short to assess the overall impact, since the half-life marks the amount of time it takes for just half of a quantity of a radioactive element to decay.

Even 16 years later, there is little consensus within the scientific community about the health consequences stemming from the accident. The latest U.N. report on Chornobyl has placed the current death toll at over 4,000, while Ambassador Yuri Shcherbak, in a report published in Scientific American in 1996, had placed it at over 30,000, and, as early as 1991, the Soviet government had cited over 50,000 deaths among liquidators. Most official news sources, however, still quote the absurdly low figure of 34 deaths, discounting any of the latent cancers or delayed health effects beyond the clean-up workers who died within the first few days of the accident.

Despite this wild divergence of opinion, there is no dispute over the fact that exposure to even a tiny dose of radiation can increase the risk of cancer or birth defects. And the doses absorbed by the Chornobyl survivors were anything but tiny. Chornobyl released over 185 million curies of radiation into the environment. Some of the soldiers involved in the removal of graphite ejected from the reactor core experienced nuclear tans requiring skin doses of between 400 and 500 rem. Some 200,000 construction workers involved in building the sarcophagus were forced to work in areas where radiation levels reached thousands of rads per hour. We know that the Soviet government prohibited doctors from identifying any post-Chornobyl deaths as radiation-related, but no one seriously doubts that large numbers of these workers will die, or have already died, prematurely as a result of their exposure.

There is no longer any dispute that the explosion in thyroid cancers among Belarusian and Ukrainian children was caused by exposure to radioactive iodine from Chornobyl. There is also growing evidence that genetic damage could reach deep into future generations. A recent study by a team of Israeli and Ukrainian doctors found a very high mutation rate in the offspring of Chornobyl liquidators (see adjacent story).

At a time when so many other scientists are looking the other way and wasting precious time that could be used to track health effects, our Ukrainian diaspora can be proud of at least two teams of researchers who are seeking the truth wherever it may lead. The first team, led by Dr. Danylo Hryhorczuk of the Great Lakes Centers for Occupational and Environmental Safety and Health, is tracking the long-term health of 6,000 women and their children in several oblasts of Ukraine from prenatal to 6 years of age. Dr. Wolodymyr Wertelecki, a world-renowned geneticist at the University of South Alabama, is leading a separate study focusing on the health of newborns in the oblasts of Rivne and Volyn, examining the incidence of spina bifida and other birth defects that have raised concerns among the local population.

Regardless of the conclusions we reach about the overall health impact of Chornobyl, there is broad agreement on the fact that Ukraine is in dire need of continuing medical and humanitarian aid. Chornobyl has exposed the antiquated health care system so shamefully neglected by Soviet authorities and many of their successors. It has shed light on Ukraine's unusually high rate of infant and maternal mortality, its high infertility and the dramatic drop in its birth rate. A small but powerful minority of Ukrainian American doctors and community activists have shown that the diaspora can still save thousands of lives and can give Ukrainian children a fighting chance to overcome cancer, leukemia and other life-threatening diseases.

As we solemnly observe Chornobyl's 16th anniversary, we must understand that to reverse Ukraine's sharp decline in health, we need to marshal the kind of advanced technology and resources we would demand for our own children in this country.

Alex Kuzma is executive director of the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund.

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