Chernobyl disaster leaves an uncertain legacy

‘Almost everybody’s sick’
Uncertainty over the long-term health consequences of Chernobyl has ignited a fierce debate.

Evacuated from her village five miles from the reactor, Ludmilla Bobrova now lives in an apartment building on the outskirts of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, with two dozen other resettled families. She blames everything from common colds to sore joints on Chernobyl.

“Almost everybody's sick,” said 65-year-old Bobrova. “My daughter is always sick. My granddaughter is always in the hospital.”

But a recent U.N. report found that of the millions of people exposed to low levels of radioactive particles spread by wind and in food following the accident, the health effects have proved generally nominal. The exception was a dramatic rise in thyroid cancer among children at the time. Thyroid disorders are widely treatable.

The report, prepared by a panel of more than 100 experts from U.N. agencies and Ukraine, Belarus and Russia — Chernobyl is near the intersection of all three countries — said the total number of deaths attributable to the Chernobyl catastrophe will be no more than 4,000, far fewer than the tens of thousands originally predicted. Cancer levels, once expected to soar, are virtually the same as in uncontaminated areas.

However, Chernobyl charities and anti-nuclear groups such as Greenpeace have widely disputed the U.N. report, suggesting that 90,000 people will die from radiation cancer.

Dr. Alexandre Perepletchikov, who conducted extensive radiation research at the Gomel Institute in Belarus’ fallout zone, said the U.N. conclusions should not be seen as definitive.

“We desperately need further evaluation, further research and study of the long term effects of low dose of radiation,” said Perepletchikov, now a pathologist at Tufts-New England Medical Center and a board member of Chernobyl Children's Project USA.

Report: Other factors take toll
In general, the U.N. report blames the generally poor health among the resettled population on poverty and unhealthy lifestyles, among them heavy smoking and drinking.

“They attribute all symptoms that they have to radiation,” said Burton Bennett, a noted American expert on radiation and an author of the U.N. report. “We know a lot about radiation, what it does and doesn’t do. The levels are simply too low to cause such effects.”

In addition, Bennett agrees with the report's claim that 20 years of misinformation about radioactivity has led people to believe they will die — and so they live as if they would, with little regard for their health. The report says this paralyzing fatalism has created a “culture of dependency.”

Contributing to this, critics say, are the benefits that seven million people in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia receive related to Chernobyl, from annual vacations to educational stipends. (They are careful though to exclude from this total a core population of 100,000 to 200,000 people who continue to be severely impacted by the Chernobyl catastrophe.)

To address this situation, the release of the U.N. report coincides with a drive to focus local and international aid on breaking the culture of dependency by developing local economies.

“We’ve got to mobilize the population, to empower it to take control of its future and finally to overcome this victim syndrome,” said Pavlo Zamostyan, director of a U.N. program that works among resettled communities in Ukraine.

‘Dictionary of desease’
No one, however, is questioning Alexander Nihaev’s illnesses.

“I am a dictionary of disease," he said. "My heart, liver, pancreas, diabetes and cataracts — the doctors say it’s all related to the radiation.”

Nihaev spent a year in a specialist hospital in Moscow recovering from the time he spent fighting fires at Chernobyl. In the years since, he has endured 19 operations — and those were just the ones under general anesthetic. “There were dozens more smaller procedures,” he said. “I’ve lost count of those.”

Now living in Kiev, Nihaev has spent a total of several years in hospitals. But he says he thinks little of the accident, preferring to focus on what he believes has kept him alive.

“I never really doubted that I would survive,” he said. “I had little children, and my goal was to raise them. I needed to feed them.”

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