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April 30, 2006
Japan lawmakers make call for compensation
NEW CHINA TIMES
Japanese lawmakers called on the government Tuesday to provide compensation to thousands of unrecognized victims of Minamata disease, a debilitating disorder caused by eating fish tainted with mercury, ahead of the 50th anniversary of the official diagnosis of the illness.
After victims endured decades of social stigmatization, corporate bullying and legal battles, the Supreme Court in October 2004 held the government responsible for allowing the pollution to continue for years, and ordered it to compensate 37 plaintiffs who were among 12,000 officially unrecognized patients.
Following the ruling, the government last April announced plans to expand its support program for thousands of patients who weren't previously eligible for government help.
The disease was named for Minamata Bay, where a Japanese chemical company, Chisso Corp., dumped tons of mercury compounds.
Since the 1950s, thousands of people have contracted the degenerative neurological disorder.
"The government must take the ruling seriously and implement measures steadily and comprehensively so that all the Minamata victims, who have endured pains both physically and mentally through the 50 long years, can live in peace and understanding," said the nonbinding resolution, passed by Parliament's lower house ahead of the 50th anniversary of the first government recognition of the disease on May 1.
The Supreme Court ruling ordered the government and Kumamoto prefecture (state) in southern Japan to provide compensation ranging from 1.5 million yen to 2.5 million yen (US$13,090 to US$21,820; euro10,590 to euro17,650) to each plaintiff.
Posted by bhola at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)
Minamata disease victims to be commemorated at new memorial
Thousands of Minamata disease victims will be commemorated at a newly installed memorial in a bayside park in the city of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, Sunday on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the official recognition of the disease.
Some 300 participants, including children, will pay their respect through traditional dancing and drumming in front of the 2.5-meter-high memorial and offering flowers.
A memorial service will be held there Monday, with some 1,000 people, including the patients, bereaved families as well as Environment Minister Yuriko Koike attending.
In Kumamoto, Kagoshima and Niigata prefectures, 2,955 people have been recognized as patients, of whom 2,009 have died as of the end of last March, according to the Environment Ministry.
Prior to the 50th anniversary, both lower and upper houses in the Diet adopted resolutions to vow not to allow a repeat of the tragic pollution while urging the government to fully support the victims of the disease and their families.
Minamata disease, caused by mercury-laced wastewater from a synthetic resin factory of Chisso Corp. in Minamata, was officially recognized on May 1, 1956.
More than 3,800 unrecognized sufferers have applied for recognition as patients, stirring voices that the tragedy over Minamata disease is stil
Posted by bhola at 07:27 AM | Comments (0)
April 29, 2006
Cuba's help for Chernobyl children: Niños de Chernobyl se recuperan en Cuba
PHOTO: RICKY DÁVILA
United Nations, April 28 2006
More than 18,000 children, victims of the disaster at Chernobyl´s nuclear station 20 years ago, have received assistance in Cuba, Cuban Ambassador to the UN Rodrigo Malmierca reported on Friday.
The Cuban permanent representative to the United Nations told a special session on the anniversary of the Tarara Humanitarian Program begun in 1990, that this program was especially designed for patients affected by that accident.
PHOTO: RICKY DÁVILA
The children arrive in our country with different diseases or health conditions, from post-traumatic stress to cancer. They are diagnosed and receive all kinds of treatments, including bone marrow transplants for those who suffer from leukemia, the diplomat said.
He clarified that neither the Cuban State nor the people have ever asked a single penny for the cost of those treatments, because the right to life of Chernobyl children cannot be bought.
Malmierca explained that the Cuban people have benefited from the generous help of the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian nations for decades, thus cooperating in the recovery of those children from the accident was simply an automatic humanitarian response.
Chernobyl victims heal in Cuba
By Anthony Boadle
TARARA (Cuba): At a beach resort near Havana, children with bald heads and skin lesions splash with joy in the warm Caribbean sea. They are victims of radiation fallout from the worst civilian disaster of the nuclear age � the 1986 power plant explosion in Chernobyl � and are in Cuba for treatment.
�I want to stay here,� says Sveta, a blue-eyed 15-year-old from Ukraine�s capital Kiev whose eyelashes are beginning to grow back.
Since 1990, communist Cuba has treated free of charge 18,000 Ukrainian children for hair loss, skin disorders, cancer, leukaemia and other illnesses attributed to the radioactivity unleashed by the reactor meltdown years before they were born.
Up to 800 children travel to the Tarara Paediatric Hospital each year for at least two months, accompanied by parents or tutors. Some stay for years. They live in bungalows built as beach houses by rich Cubans before Fidel Castro�s 1959 revolution.
Most get treatment for hair loss, spending 15 minutes a day under an infra-red light after a lotion made from human placenta is applied to their heads. Hair grows back in 60 per cent of cases, said Dr. Giraldo Hernandez.
Many children suffer from vitiligo, a patchy loss of skin pigmentation, which is treated with another placenta-based lotion and lots of sunlight on the beach. Psoriasis is also common.
More serious cases of cancer require chemotherapy or surgery.
Six leukaemia patients have received bone marrow transplants in Cuba.
While some disorders, such as the 30-fold increase in thyroid cancer among Ukrainian children, are directly linked to the Chernobyl accident, scientists do not know whether hair loss is caused by radioactive pollution or post-traumatic stress.
Recreation in the tropical sun is as much a part of the cure as the medical treatment, Cuban doctors say.
Niños de Chernobyl se recuperan en Cuba
Por el Hospital Pediátrico de Tarará, en las afueras de La Habana, han pasado ya casi 24 mil pacientes de Ucrania, Rusia, Bielorrusia, Moldavia, Armenia y Brasil, todos ellos afectados por accidentes radiactivos.
La mayoría, sin embargo, son niños ucranianos tocados de una u otra forma por la catástrofe de la central nuclear de Chernobyl que aún hoy cobra victimas entre la población de la región.
Llegan a la isla con las más variadas dolencias, desde estrés postraumático hasta cáncer, aquí son evaluados y reciben todo tipo de tratamientos incluidos trasplantes de médula para quienes padecen de leucemia.
El proyecto se inició en el ano 1990. El Ministerio de Salud de Ucrania paga el viaje de los niños a Cuba y todo el resto del financiamiento del programa corre a cargo del gobierno cubano.
Los pacientes
Dibujo de niño ucraniano acerca de su estadía en Cuba
Un niño ucraniano recuerda su estadía en Cuba.
Los pacientes son clasificados aquí en 4 grupos, en el primero de ellos están los que traen enfermedades con peligro para la vida, oncohematologicas y de tratamientos quirúrgicos muy complejos.
En el resto de los grupos están los enfermos con dolencias menores, algunas de ellas con atención ambulatoria, además de otros niños, aparentemente sanos, que pasan un chequeo medico de control.
"Yo estoy aquí por la enfermedad de mi niña, angioma cavernosa, llevamos dos años y medio.
Por este tiempo ya le han realizado cuatro operaciones y hacen falta más", nos cuenta Tatiana Malovana, madre de la pequeña Stefania.
La recuperación
Tatiana nos explica que estarán en Cuba cuanto sea necesario por su niña y afirma que en Ucrania "hay ese tratamiento pero vale mucho y nosotros no tenemos tanto dinero, aquí los doctores cubanos nos ayudan sin dinero".
Niños pacientes en Cuba. Fotos: Raquel Pérez
Miles de niños han sido tratados en Cuba por sus dolencias debido a accidentes radioactivos.
La doctora Xenia Laurenti, subdirectora del Programa de Chernobyl, nos explica que la atención sigue vigente porque el material radiactivo vertido, Cesio 137, es capaz de seguir actuando durante décadas.
La doctora le dijo a la BBC que este programa continuará porque "nuestra disposición está abierta de forma infinita, no hay un límite, siempre y cuando hayan niños o personas que necesiten de nuestra ayuda".
"Vienen afectados por esa sensación de catástrofe. Cuando uno le pregunta a un niño qué es lo que quiere, pide un juguete, pero estos niños lo que mas rápido responden es que quieren tener salud", nos cuenta la subdirectora.
Para la doctora Laurenti, "los momentos más difíciles son cuando alguien fallece, hemos tenido siete que han sido niños que han necesitado un trasplante de corazón, renal o de médula y que ya llegaron a nuestro país con un estado de salud precario".
Estudios sobre el ADN
Dibujo de niño ucraniano en Cuba acerca de la tragedia de Chernobyl
Uno de los niños ucranianos atendidos en Cuba dejó este dibujo sobre su visión de la tragedia.
Durante todos estos años el Ministerio de Salud Pública de Cuba ha logrado reunir un extenso banco de datos sobre la contaminación interna, externa y en tiroides por el CS-137, la sustancia radiactiva del accidente de Chernobyl.
Entre los estudios realizados por los científicos cubanos está el valorar los efectos en el ADN, indicadores asociados a la carcinogénesis, alteraciones del ciclo celular y determinar mutaciones y marcadores del sistema hematopoyético.
De estos estudios se desprende, por ejemplo, que el 60% de los niños tratados presentan algún nivel de contaminación interna y que el aumento de ésta hace crecer la frecuencia de hiperplasias tiroideas.
Los resultados de estos análisis científicos fueron entregados al Organismo Internacional de Energía Atómica (OIEA) y al Comité de la ONU para el Estudio de los Efectos de las Radiaciones Atómicas (UNSCEAR).
Posted by bhola at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)
Asahi Shimbun editorial: 20 years after Chernobyl
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
April 28th 2006
It is a truism that memories fade with time. To young people, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986, is about to become a topic of history learned in schools. They are to be taught about an event that occurred 20 years ago, but not in the context of how such tragedies can have a huge impact on the world today. We wonder how best to pass on such essential lessons to younger generations.
In the meantime, moves are under way to do away with follow-up surveys of Chernobyl-related illnesses even though survivors of the accident continue to suffer greatly. Once again, we feel it is absolutely necessary to take a new look at the lessons of the disaster in the former Soviet Union.
The accident occurred during an experiment that was conducted on the assumption that outside power supply had been cut. The output of one of the nuclear reactors rose rapidly, causing an explosion that scattered high-temperature radioactive plumes into the atmosphere. About 50 people who battled the blaze immediately after the accident died because of exposure to radioactivity.
An area of more than 4,000 square kilometers surrounding the accident site is still off-limits. It covers parts of Ukraine and Belarus and is about as large as Kyoto Prefecture. Roughly 400,000 people, including those living in Russia, were evacuated.
The survivors are having a hard time living in resettled areas. They get by on pensions but because of economic recession, government aid is declining. Health problems are rampant. About 4,000 children developed thyroid cancer. Once the thyroid gland is removed, a patient must take hormones each day. Mothers worry about giving birth. Between 600,000 and 800,000 people who worked to seal the broken reactor complain of health problems.
The governments of Ukraine and Belarus allocate about 5 percent of their national budgets to Chernobyl-related measures. But that is not nearly enough. Stronger international cooperation is needed to study the health conditions of survivors and give financial aids for their lives. This is the absolute least that countries using nuclear power for energy can do. It is our shared responsibility.
In hindsight, we realize the accident had a major impact on countries with nuclear power plants. They learned that accidents can happen and set about implementing advanced safety measures.
The former Soviet Union was able to forcibly evacuate residents from areas surrounding the accident site only because its land was so vast. There is no way countries such as Japan and small nations in Europe could evacuate large numbers of people from an area equivalent in size. We cannot imagine the instability that would result.
After the accident, the Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident and the Convention on Nuclear Safety were established. It stipulates the framework of safety regulations. Dangerous nuclear power plants in Eastern Europe were closed. The Chernobyl disaster put a damper on the trend to build more nuclear power plants.
What has Japan learned from this terrible disaster? The nuclear power industry pinned the blame entirely on the fact the accident occurred in the former Soviet Union. It said the situation in Japan is quite different. Over the past two decades, the number of nuclear reactors in Japan has risen from 32 to 55. As a result, Japan ranks No. 3 in the world in terms of nuclear reactors.
In 1999, a criticality accident occurred at a uranium processing plant in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, causing two deaths. In 2004, a pipe ruptured at a nuclear reactor of the Mihama nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture run by Kansai Electric Power Co. It spewed nonradioactive steam at high pressure, killing five workers. There has been a spate of problems at older nuclear power plants. Yet, the power industry is pushing to prolong the life of the facilities to 60 years.
The key lesson of Chernobyl is to always be on the alert with the awareness that "once a major nuclear accident occurs, everything is over." We must not let the lesson fade.
Posted by bhola at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)
The negative effects of a positive void coefficient
INDIANAPOLIS -- A "positive void coefficient" was the tidy phrase they used to describe the unspeakable nuclear conflagration that erupted out of the No. 4 reactor at Chernobyl 20 years ago.
On this date back then, thousands of tons of airborne strontium-90 and other radioactive isotope particulates were drifting lazily across the then-Soviet Union and parts of Eastern Europe as Soviet administrators began day three of the disaster with renewed official denials that the thundering radioactive fires represented anything but a "minor incident".
Though they didn't know it, hundreds of firefighters and Soviet soldiers were already sentenced to a gruesome death: they were lethally saturated with gamma radiation streaming from the sparkling blue molten fuel rods.
Years later, U.N. and other officials estimate that more than 100 times the radiation from the Hiroshima blast was released on April 26, 1986 with the true effects still not known. In a twisted turn of events, the aftereffects of Chernobyl are today intensely studied by U.S. Homeland Security experts as the reactor blast now serves as a macabre model for the possible repercussions of a terrorist "dirty bomb".
Intense media coverage followed the days immediately following the disaster as the Gorbachev administration reluctantly disclosed the extent of the catastrophe and even solicited Western aid. After a few weeks, the media -- together with much of the world -- turned their attention elsewhere.
Despite increasing leakages and unstable structural issues, the shuttered nuclear facility today represents a growing tourist attraction. The nearby abandoned city of Pripyat and other official radioactive "dead zones" now attract regular visitors and commentary about the hazards associated with atom-focused electrical generation.
Despite the faded media attention, severe health issues began materializing around the Chernobyl area particularly in children born in the years following.
Perhaps most horrific of all, young girls exposed to Chernobyl radiation (who later became mothers in the 1990s) started showing up with "germ line" mutations: changes in the DNA of sperm and human eggs. Warned Denise Adler, a radiation expert at the University of Geneva in Switzerland: "Genetic defects may remain hidden for several generations. We have to expect more."
This highly radioactive ferris wheel in Pripyat has become a symbol of the Chernobyl devastation. It will never be ridden again.
Pediatric thyroid cancer levels exploded in the years following the explosion. Radiation-related children illnesses increased to the point where the BBC reported that four out of five children living in Chernihev (a city of 250,000 near Chernobyl) suffered from some Chernobyl-influenced malady.
As the pediatric cases mounted up, available health-care resources in the Ukraine were quickly outstripped particularly in the years following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. For helpless and largely forgotten children victims of the nuclear disaster, the future looked increasingly grim.
On a visit to England 10 years after the explosion, Indianapolis resident Victor Kubik (a second-generation Ukrainian and U.S. citizen) learned from a retired British pediatrician of the growing problem.
The pediatrician, Morris Frohm, was joining other British medical professionals to try to assess the real situation. Kubik, who was born in a World War II German relocation camp before emigrating to the U.S. with his parents, still had family living in Ukraine. Knowing the culture and language, he impulsively volunteered as a translator.
"I was horrified at the news of all of these children in overcrowded hospitals," Kubik recalled for ePrairie. "I just had to do something."
Pleasantly surprised, the pediatrician agreed and the two made plans. A few months later, the pair stepped off a plane in Kiev and Kubik's life was changed forever. Evidence of economic chaos from the breakup of the Soviet Union was everywhere (Ukraine was now an independent county). What immediately caught Kubik's eye were little black boxes in public buildings and walkways.
While Kubik first thought they were modified clocks to display time and temperature for the region, they weren't. Instead, they represented the sinister presence of Chernobyl as they measured and displayed microrads from airborne nuclides (even a full decade after the reactor exploded). He added: "People living in Ukraine were thus reminded every day of what they were living in. It was depressing."
What was even more depressing was the Ukrainian hospitals filled with sick children in some cases to double capacity. Kubik, whose full-time job is that of a pastor and administrator with the United Church of God, felt "overwhelmingly compelled to do something," he said. He and the British pediatrician were introduced to a pediatrician from the Chernobyl area named Vasyl Pasechnick.
Pasechnick, who was later decorated for bravery, drew official Soviet ire immediately after the Chernobyl explosion when he publicly called for massive distribution of iodide (particularly for the children living in the area). Had his public plea been heeded, absorption of the iodide would have reduced radiation poisoning of the children's thyroid glands. He was muzzled and disciplined, though, by Soviet authorities trying to contain news of the explosion.
Ten years after the nuclear disaster, Pasechnick was struggling to build and run a children's clinic to deal with the rehabilitation nightmare of hundreds of children trying to overcome the latent effects of the blast (both physical and psychological).
Kubik, a self-professed technology geek, set out with his wife, Beverly, to help Pasechnick. In the early days of the commercial Internet, Kubik taught himself enough HTML code and Web authoring skills to put up a Web site to attract attention to Pasechnick's center, which is now called The Revival Centre.
Working the phones to build a network and scouring federal documents, Kubik and his wife found a means to ship critically needed medical supplies to the center. Battling bureaucratic delays, customs issues and outright graft by government employees, Kubik, his wife and a growing band of volunteers managed to ship more than $1 million in supplies to Pasechnick.
Kubik subsequently brought Pasechnick over to the U.S. in the late 1990s to meet other medical professionals at St. Jude's Hospital in Nashville, Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis and other major medical operations specializing in children.
On this trip, Pasechnick and Kubik were invited to meet Indiana First Lady Judy O'Bannon. The meeting turned into a partnership: "I was quite taken with both the Ukrainian doctor and with Vic," O'Bannon said. "Victor profoundly struck me as a true servant leader and someone who could do a lot of good for people."
The meeting spawned the founding of a new humanitarian organization in Indianapolis called LifeNets International. With the help of the Internet, Kubik now serves dozens of humanitarian projects around the world from his Indianapolis home.
Largely through the direct support of this organization, the Ukrainian center has grown to serve hundreds of Chernobyl-affected children. Kubik will return to the center in June for its 10th anniversary. Joining him this time will be several Ukrainian government officials and the British ambassador to the Ukraine to recognize what a difference one selfless human being can make.
Posted by bhola at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)
Marianna Grigorian and Gayane Mkrtchian: Chernobyl generations
Published 2:15 am PDT Tuesday, May 2, 2006
YEREVAN, Armenia -- Sennik Alexanian's skin has a strange yellow hue; his bones stick out and his eyes bulge. At 49, his immune system has collapsed. Like thousands of others, he divides his life into two periods -- before and after Chernobyl.
Alexanian was one of the 3,000 Armenians who along with tens of thousands of others from across the former Soviet Union was sent to help clear up the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine 20 years ago. Many of them have suffered severe health problems ever since; more than 350 of those sent from Armenia have died.
On April 26, at an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in history, Prime Minister Andranik Margarian promised that the government would provide greater support to those injured by the disaster. But many here say that their government has let them down.
Alexanian recalled being sent to Chernobyl after the plant exploded.
"They put us in a train and didn't tell me or my family where they were sending me," he said. "If I hadn't gone and I'd run away, they'd have put me on trial as an enemy of the people." He said he had no idea of the hazards he was being exposed to.
"Radiation does not have a smell or a color," said Alexanian. "We just started feeling unwell and had constant headaches and dizziness and everyone had constant nosebleeds."
Gevorg Vardanian, now chairman of the Armenian Chernobyl Association, spent 11 months in Chernobyl and today suffers from serious radiation sickness.
"In Ukraine, the public didn't know what had happened and during the May Day parade, radioactive rain fell on people," he recalled. "The most terrible thing was that there were students among those who brought people out of Chernobyl. They had no idea they had been brought into a disaster zone."
Now that the Soviet Union is no more, each individual republic that once made up the superpower is now responsible for caring for the victims of the disaster.
But unlike many other former Soviet republics, Armenia has not allocated substantial funds for the medical treatment of Chernobyl survivors.
Alexanian said that he doesn't have the money to pay for adequate treatment and that his family has already sold everything it owned to pay for his medical bills.
No longer able to work, he said he receives a pension of about $46 a month, but that won't even cover the cost of the medication he requires.
"When we apply to the appropriate offices hoping for help, they tell us sarcastically, 'You shouldn't have gone.' But it wasn't up to us," he said. "No one went knowingly to a slow death."
The legacy of Chernobyl has been passed on to a new generation as well. Alexanian blames Chernobyl for the numerous medical problems that have affected his young son, Vachagan, now 6.
Vardanian said that most of the Armenians sent to Chenobyl are no longer able to work. They live in poor conditions and lack the money for their basic needs.
"We thought the troubles that began for us in Chernobyl would end in Armenia, but it seems there is no end to them," Vardanian said. "Not just the rescuers, but more than 30 percent of their children suffer from a whole host of defects and have serious health problems."
Vardanian is especially angry with his government for failing to aid those in need.
"We have no special law which defends the rights of those who took part in the Chernobyl emergency and gives them the benefits that others from all over the former Soviet Union are receiving," he said.
Earlier this year, a parliamentary commission drafted a law that would guarantee the welfare of the Chernobyl victims and their children.
"The draft law is being discussed," said Gagik Mkheyan, head of the commission.
However, government ministries are already criticizing the bill.
"In our opinion, Armenia does not need a law like this," said Jemma Baghdasarian, an official with the Ministry of Labor, who claimed that Chernobyl survivors are already adequately provided for.
Nikolai Hovhannissian, head of Armenia's Center for Radioactive Medicine and Burns, said he understands the concerns of the Chernobyl rescuers, but that Armenia simply cannot afford to look after them.
"The state envisages spending about $200 on each sick person, which includes the cost of the electricity used by the hospital, the salaries of the medical staff, medicine, food," said Hovhannissian. "What can you say? This amount is not enough to solve even a part of the problems of the sufferers."
"We have the impression that everyone is against us. We are like walking corpses, whom no one needs," said Vazgen Gyurjinian, another Chernobyl survivor.
Gyurjinian, an electrician, was 28 when he was sent to the Chernobyl disaster zone. Now 46, he talks in a hoarse voice and is short of breath. He has had three heart attacks.
"It's not just us, who are unsuited for life by now, who need this law, but our children and grandchildren," Gyurjinian said. "Maybe some of us have healthy children, but that does not guarantee us from sick grandchildren. We and our families have been permanently damaged."
About the writers:
* Marianna Grigorian and Gayane Mkrtchian are journalists in Armenia who write for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 48 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8LT, U.K. Web: www.iwpr.net. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
Posted by bhola at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)
Welsh pupils unite to help Chernobyl victims: two Harrogate schools go bananas for Chernobyl kids
Apr 28 2006 - George Tattum, Mold Chronicle
Children releasing balloons for Chernobyl
A CHARITY which provides holidays for young victims of the Chernobyl disaster has enlisted Deeside children to take part in its latest fund-raising campaign.
Pupils from Golftyn Primary School, Connah's Quay, joined local Chernobyl Children's Life Line organisers to sell balloons to shoppers in Chester.
Jeanette Jones, of Connah's Quay, secretary of the charity's Chester, Deeside and Ellesmere Port Link, said the youngsters were enthusiastic and keen to help the children in Chernobyl.
The charity brings over groups of children from the stricken region and works to raise awareness of their plight.
'You can really notice the difference when they have been over here on holiday. We try to give them an experience of a lifetime,' said Jeanette.
Golftyn Junior School has already raised £625 for the charity by selling cakes and organising an Easter chick hunt and cross county run.
Now children have been buying balloons which were released in Chester on Wednesday and a £50 prize is on offer to the person whose balloon travels the furthest. For information call 01244 818940.
Chernobyl fundraiser bears fruit at two Harrogate schools
SIXTH formers in Harrogate went bananas this week when they raised money to help children from Chernobyl who visit the town each year.
St Aidan’s and St John Fisher’s organised the two-day sale, which is expected to drum up more than £300 and made £200 on the first day alone.
Funds will be donated to the Chernobyl Children’s Life Line – a charity that arranges annual visits to the region for youngsters living in the shadow of the biggest ever nuclear disaster, which happened 20 years ago this year.
Donated by ASDA, bananas were sold because the Chernobyl children always relish Britain’s fresh fruit and vegetables when they visit Harrogate.
Blast provides important lesson
ON THE 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster on Wednesday, Friends of the Earth Cymru praised First Minister Rhodri Morgan for resisting pressure to support the building of new nuclear power stations in Wales.
The group believes that Chernobyl should act as a warning against the building of any nuclear power stations.
On the night of April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station in present-day Ukraine went out of control and exploded, releasing 100 times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It took until May 6 to bring the fire and radioactive emissions under control. While the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia bore the brunt of the emissions, radiation also spread over large parts of Scandinavia, central Europe and the UK.
Due to meat contamination levels exceeding safety limits, almost 9,000 farms in the UK had restrictions placed on the movement and sale of sheep.
Although officials stated that these restrictions would only last a matter of weeks, 359 farms and 176,000 sheep in Wales are still subject to the restrictions 20 years later. Estimates of the deaths that are likely to result from the blast vary from 4,000 to 60,000.
Friends of the Earth Cymru Assembly campaigner Gordon James said: 'An important lesson to be learned from the Chernobyl disaster is that when nuclear power plants go wrong they can go wrong in big and unexpected ways.
'Twenty years on it is now time to put an end to nuclear power once and for all.'
Posted by bhola at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)
Koizumi apologizes for public hazard
(UPI Top Stories Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi apologized in a statement Friday for the government's failure to prevent the spread of environmental pollution.
Koizumi's remarks were made Monday before the 50th anniversary of the recognition of what is known as Minamata disease.
It's named after the area in Kumamoto Prefecture in southern Japan where chemical maker Chisso Corp. dumped tons of mercury-laden wastewater into the sea. In the 1950s hundreds of residents died, thousands were disabled and there were innumerable birth defects.
The issue of Minamata disease that occurred in the course of Japan's rapid economic growth not only caused serious health hazards, but also inflicted a heavy sacrifice on local communities, Koizumi said, Kyodo News reported Friday.
On behalf of the government, we feel keen responsibility and frankly apologize for the failures to take appropriate steps for a long period and to prevent the spread of sufferings from Minamata disease, he said.
May 1, 1956, is the day the disease was brought to light for the first time and the first official apology came from the Supreme Court ruling in October 2004 that held the state responsible.
Posted by bhola at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2006
As UN Assembly marks 20 years since Chernobyl, officials urge continued action
ASAHI SHIMBUN
28 April 2006 – The United Nations General Assembly today marked 20 years since the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the most severe in the history of the nuclear power industry, with officials calling for more action to address the health and other challenges faced by Belarus, the Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the countries most affected by the catastrophe.
The Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Kemal Dervis, hailed progress in addressing the problems caused by the 1986 accident, which led to a huge release of radionuclides, but said more needed to be done for the communities still dealing with its aftermath.
“The biggest challenge now facing affected territories is being the need to create new jobs, promote investment and growth, restore a sense of community self-reliance, and improve local living standards,” he said.
Mr. Dervis also highlighted that UNDP's mandate is “to work together with the three governments, the affected communities, as well as with other UN agencies and international organizations, to find the right solutions to the development challenges posed by Chernobyl.”
Emphasizing the health fallout from the disaster, the head of the UN children's agency (UNICEF) told the gathered delegates that the most dramatic health impact was the increased incidence of childhood thyroid cancer caused by radioactive iodine fallout.
“In a cruel irony, just as iodine deficiency in the affected area made children more vulnerable 20 years ago to the radioactive iodine fallout even now it continues to affect thousands of children,” stressed Executive Director Ann M. Veneman, noting that iodine deficiency is the world's leading cause of mental retardation.
In areas like those affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe, where iodine deficiency is endemic, it has been shown to lower the IQ level of children by an average of about 13 points, according to UNICEF, which advocates universal iodization of salt to ensure that everyone benefits from the protection of iodine. Today, only about 55 percent of households in Belarus consume iodized salt and in Russia and Ukraine, that figure is about 30 percent.
Ms. Veneman said this means that every year, an estimated 41,000 children in Belarus, 274,000 children in Ukraine, and 1 million children in the Russian Federation are born iodine-deficient. “What is needed is a commitment to action from the leaders of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine and the international community stands ready to help,” she said.
The representative of Belarus, Andrei Dapkiunas, said the Assembly meeting was an encouraging sign that the international community had not forgotten the many people affected by the tragic 1986 accident. Citing UN experts, he said the overall damage had cost some $235 billion. Belarus had spent more than $17 billion to address post-Chernobyl issues, and had relocated approximately 140,000 people. Those achievements had been accompanied by much-needed assistance from foreign partners, he said.
Igor Shcherbak of Russia said after the disaster, more than 59,000 square kilometers of the country had been contaminated – an area that was home to 3 million Russian people. He praised the “catalytic and coordinating role” of the UN, as the international community worked to provided assistance in the field of health, help rehabilitate agriculture and promote the information exchange network.
Volodymyr Kholosha, Deputy Minister of Emergency for Ukraine, noted that 10 per cent of Ukraine's land was affected by radiation, as 164,000 people had been forced to move out of 170 towns and leave their homes to go live elsewhere. For some years, Ukraine had been compelled to spend 12 per cent of its State budget for measures, such as improved medical services and environmental clean-up and thanked the international community for its support.
Posted by bhola at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
My mission to help Chernobyl children
ROYSTON CROW - 27 April 2006
Nicola Dunklin working to help the children of Chernobyl
YESTERDAY (Wednesday) marked the 20th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear power accident - Chernobyl.
The accident released 190 tons of highly radioactive waste material into the atmosphere, exposing the people of Chernobyl to radioactivity 90 times greater than that from the explosion of the Hiroshima atomic bomb - with children being the most affected.
The news coverage haunted one woman from Melbourn so much that she has made it her lifelong ambition to do what she can to help those children.
Nicola Dunklin, who is a teaching assistant at Melbourn Village College, is now trying to set up a South Cambridgeshire branch of the charity, Friends of Chernobyl Children (FOCC).
She said: "I have always wanted to have a child over from Chernobyl, but as there is no FOCC branch in the area, I haven't been able to.
"So I thought, why not go about setting up a branch so I can help a child?"
The charity organises daily activities, so that working families can take part as hosts.
It also provides interpreters who travel with the children and are on 24 hour call.
Nicola is now trying to find like-minded people who would like to know more about becoming host families.
She said: "I've had an amazing response so far.
"By having a child over here just for four weeks, you can help to extend their life expectancy by two years, as everything they eat in Russia is contaminated.
"They'll arrive with nothing, so everyone always tries to send them back with as much as they can cram in!
"People I've spoken to who have been host families have said that all they want to do is eat fruit, which is a refreshing change from children wanting sweets!"
Nicola is holding a presentation evening next Thursday at Melbourn Village College with the founder and director of FOCC, Olwyn Keogh.
She said: "In all my life, all I've ever wanted to do is make a difference and know I've done some good.
"It's such a small thing to do for such a big return.
"How else can you help to extend a child's life by two years?"
- Anyone who would like to become involved should contact Nicola on 01763 220651.
To attend the evening, which starts at 7.30pm, contact Nicola on the above number or the school on 01763 223400, or by emailing office@mvc.org.uk.
- For more information on FOCC, visit the website at www.focc.org.uk.
Posted by bhola at 06:54 AM | Comments (0)
In Belarus, Chernobyl is rallying point
L.A. TIMES
The 20th anniversary of the nuclear disaster in neighboring Ukraine is the backdrop for new demonstrations against the government. Kim Murphy, April 27, 2006
MINSK, Belarus — In a country still deeply ravaged by the worst nuclear accident in history, opposition leaders rallied thousands in the streets of this capital on Wednesday, calling for the impeachment of President Alexander G. Lukashenko and accusing his government of failing to protect citizens from lingering radiation 20 years after the Chernobyl power plant disaster.
In a day marked by somber observances all over the former Soviet republic that suffered greatly from the radioactive fallout in 1986, opposition leaders who are contesting the legitimacy of the March 19 presidential election seized on the Chernobyl anniversary to mobilize about 10,000 demonstrators.
The protesters defied police orders to avoid the city center and marched for more than three hours across Minsk before dispersing at a church dedicated to victims of Chernobyl. The power plant is about 200 miles southeast of here in neighboring Ukraine.
The rally was an important test of the opposition's strength, in light of violent police crackdowns on two earlier postelection demonstrations that left several protesters injured and resulted in the arrest of an estimated 1,200 protesters and opposition leaders over the last month. Former presidential contender Alexander Kozulin, arrested in March while leading a march toward a jail where his supporters were being detained, remains behind bars and faces up to six years in prison on a charge of hooliganism.
Democratic forces leader Alexander Milinkevich, who officially garnered only 6% of the vote in an election international observers said was carried out in a way that heavily skewed the vote toward Lukashenko, claims the president should have been prevented under the constitution from standing for a third term and said Belarus citizens would not wait until the next elections to displace him.
"We are not going to wait until 2011. Maybe we will succeed in a year, or two years, everything depends on us," Milinkevich told supporters at a rally sanctioned by the authorities outside the Academy of Sciences. "We will depose this regime by peaceful actions. We will initiate the procedure of impeachment."
The Chernobyl anniversary provided fertile ground for political opponents in a country that lay directly in the path of some of the Ukrainian power plant's worst fallout. About a quarter of the country was contaminated with radioactive cesium and strontium, and smaller amounts of plutonium, yet large numbers of Belarusians either never left the contaminated zones or have slowly returned to them.
Lukashenko's government has encouraged the resumption of agricultural production in some of the contaminated areas, arguing that the food produced is badly needed and meets international standards.
"New [contaminated] territories are being plowed, and people are being fed the idea that radiation is just something made up by the opposition," Milinkevich's organization said in a message to supporters. "They are growing wheat on lands polluted with cesium and strontium; these lands have become pastures for cattle, and from them, meat and dairy products are made which are sold as so-called 'pure' agricultural products."
Milinkevich was summoned to the prosecutor's office Wednesday afternoon and warned not to proceed with his plan to appear at Oktyabrskaya Square. The opposition had distributed 300,000 leaflets this week directing supporters to go to the square, but authorities banned any rally there and authorized gatherings only on the outskirts of downtown.
But Milinkevich nonetheless appeared on the edge of the square and proceeded to lead thousands of supporters down Independence Avenue toward the site of the authorized rally, even as police followed the crowd with loudspeakers, warning that they were violating the law.
"The police are with the people, and the people are with the police," one middle-aged woman wryly told a female companion as the spectacle passed by.
"Locked in a fight," her friend replied.
Anatoly Lebedko, head of the United Civic Party, was detained four hours before the rally and released only after its conclusion. Vintsuk Vyachorka, head of the Belarusian Popular Front, was arrested shortly after the event.
Outside the church dedicated to Chernobyl victims, the ending point of the march, many protesters waved flags and shouted slogans such as "Freedom" and "One Road — Belarus to Europe." Others quietly placed wreaths and lighted candles.
"The state policy is that Chernobyl does not exist. It's as if it never happened," said Vera Tityenkova, a 49-year-old design engineer, whose father died of cancer five years ago after living all of his life along the border near Chernobyl. "We don't have dose meters, products are not being tested — milk, potatoes, or other vegetables, how can they test all of it? They want people to forget it and how dangerous it is still."
Svetlana Prokhorenko, a 51-year-old computer programmer, had to have her thyroid removed last year and now recalls the "strange rain" that fell on Minsk in the days after the Chernobyl disaster.
"They told us there was some kind of accident," she said. "But nobody told us it was dangerous to be outside."
Posted by bhola at 06:51 AM | Comments (0)
Ex-environmental leaders tout nuclear energy
NEW YORK TIMES - MATTHEW L. WALD
April 25, 2006
WASHINGTON, April 24 — The nuclear industry has hired Christie Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the environmental organization, to lead a public relations campaign for new reactors.
Nuclear power is "environmentally friendly, affordable, clean, dependable and safe," Mrs. Whitman said at a news conference on Monday. She said that as the E.P.A. leader for two and a half years, ending in June 2003, and as governor of New Jersey for seven years, she had promoted various means to reduce the emission of gases that cause global warming and pollution.
But Mrs. Whitman said that "none of them will have as great a positive impact on our environment as will increasing our ability to generate electricity from nuclear power."
Mrs. Whitman headed the E.P.A. when it published rules for the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. After she left the office, the courts threw out the rules because they covered only the first 10,000 years of waste storage, while peak releases of radiation were expected after that time.
Organizers released a list of 58 companies and institutions and 10 people who they said were members of a new Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which Mr. Moore said would engage in "grass-roots advocacy." A spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association of reactor operators, acknowledged that it was providing all of the financing, but would not say what the budget was.
Mr. Moore said he favored efficiency and renewable energy, but added that solar cells, which produce electricity from sunlight, were "being given too much emphasis and taking too much money." A dollar spent on geothermal energy, he said, was "10 to 12 times more effective in reducing greenhouse emissions."
Mr. Moore is the director of a company that distributes geothermal systems in Canada. He is also a supporter of what he called "sustainable forestry" because, he said, building with wood avoided the use of materials whose manufacture releases greenhouse gases, like steel and concrete.
Mr. Moore, who left Greenpeace in 1986, favors many technologies that some environmentalists oppose, including the genetic engineering of crops, and has referred to his former colleagues as "environmental extremists" and "anti-human."
Mr. Moore said Greenpeace was wrong to oppose nuclear energy, which he called essential to reducing global warming gases. Coincidentally, Greenpeace released a report on Monday about 200 failures at American nuclear power plants, which it described as "near misses," since 1986. The report was to mark the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion in the former Soviet Union.
Mrs. Whitman also referred to Chernobyl, saying people "still think in terms of Bhopal and Chernobyl." A leak at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India, killed more than 2,500 people in December 1984. But nuclear power, she said, "can be safely and appropriately used to expand our mix."
Representatives of the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Teamsters also spoke in favor of new reactors.
Posted by bhola at 06:49 AM | Comments (0)
Blowing up Chernobyl
SPIKED, 27 April 2006
Twenty years on from the explosion, the anti-nuclear lobby is still playing fast and loose with the facts about casualties.
by James Woudhuysen
Two decades on from the explosion at Chernobyl nuclear power station on 26 April 1986, the anti-nuclear lobby plays fast and loose with the facts about suffering and death.
To the Science Museum, London, where the trendy Dana Centre held a discussion last night on 'Chernobyl and the Nuclear Debate' (1). As the audience waits for a speaker from the Ukraine to come on the phone line, I cast my mind back to when Chernobyl happened. At the time, the British media speculated about the reactor falling though the centre of the Earth and coming up the other side. Tonight, there might be a similar tendency to inflate the consequences of Chernobyl. This time, however, the focus is likely to be less on the possible collapse in the planet, and more on the mass of victims that have emerged, and have still to emerge, since the disaster.
Eventually, we hear the confident voice and the sighs of Dmitriy Bobro, head of Chernobyl issues at the Ministry of Emergencies, Kiev. According to Bobro, speaking through an interpreter, Ukraine spends between two and three per cent of its GDP just to maintain what's left of Chernobyl. Ten per cent of the country's land is contaminated. Above all, 67 million people in the area covered by the former Soviet Union have suffered because of the disaster, including two million Ukrainians.
From the floor, I ask for clarification on the numbers. Bobro's voice now seems to be quieter and more hesitant. He replies that, in the Ukraine, hundreds of thousands were obliged to help in the clean-up after the accident, hundreds of thousands were resettled, similar numbers are still living on contaminated areas because there are no better places to live. Hundreds of thousands of children have suffered: they have been taken for treatment to places such as Cuba and France.
As an acting minister, Bobro should know the figures. Yet they seem to me extraordinarily high. To his credit, Bobro did add some points that we need to remember in debates like this. People, he said, are afraid of nuclear energy - they have what he called 'radiophobia'. This term, which has also been used and supported by experts at the IAEA and others, refers to the fear of radiation, and the belief that such fears may have caused as much hardship as the accident at Chernobyl itself. Over the past 20 years, Bobro says, the 'literacy' of the public in nuclear and broader energy matters related to safety and energy 'has not improved much'. Bobro is in fact optimistic that problems can be solved - over 100 years. Decommissioning, he hopes, can start in five years.
Radio broadcaster and scientist Dr Johnny Ball, a member of Supporters of Nuclear Energy (2), is passionately optimistic about nuclear power - too passionately, and not enough dispassionately, for my taste. But it is left to him to point out that, in 1986, the number of people who actually died of acute radiation sickness was 28. Ball also notes that the sinking of the Titanic, and the crashing of early versions of the Comet and the Concorde, did not lead to the end of these modes of transport. Lessons were learned from these disasters.
The presentations conclude with slides by Professor Keith Barnham, a specialist in photovoltaic panels at the Department of Physics, Imperial College London. Barnham begins with the potential for a kamikaze terrorist attack on a reactor: if Sellafield got it in the neck, the release of just one per cent of its plutonium in a smoke plume could require the evacuation of an area extending from the coast of Cumbria to Newcastle. Just five kilograms of plutonium, in the wrong hands, could devastate a city.
Barnham says that it will take 350,000 years for the plutonium in the UK's civil nuclear stockpile to decay. No fewer than 10,000 future generations will have to be concerned because just two current generations have wanted to provide 20 per cent of their electricity through nuclear means. How, Barnham asked, can we even build a sign to warn such future generations of the positions of the 500 sites around Chernobyl in which nuclear waste has hastily been buried?
I'm surprised that a physicist like Barnham has so little confidence about the abilities of future generations. But I'm not surprised that, in his enthusiasm for renewable energy, he prefers to spend much more time eulogising offshore wind power than he does getting to grips with the real - and the imagined - scale of suffering that can be laid at the door of Chernobyl.
Apparently, the effects of Chernobyl have reached British bellies
On 18 April, Greenpeace published 'The Chernobyl catastrophe: consequences for human health' (3). The 137-page report, mainly compiled by scientists in Kiev, attacks 'Health effects of the Chernobyl accident and special care programmes', an earlier report by the Chernobyl Forum, whose members include Various UN bodies, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation (WHO) Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (4).
The Chernobyl Forum noted that the number of deaths immediately attributable to fallout from the accident was 28 in 1986, and later another 19 - mostly firefighters and other workers near the site. It attributed 4,000 extra deaths, in the future, to Chernobyl. Yet the newer Greenpeace report challenges the claims of this expert report, and argues that there will be 93,000 extra deaths due to cancers originating with Chernobyl. Over the past 15 years, it argues, a further 60,000 Russians have died because of the accident, and the total death toll for the Ukraine and Belarus could reach another 140,000.
At the same time, Greenpeace attacks the Chernobyl Forum by arguing against the whole concept of quantifying the number of deaths: 'Any description which attempts to present the consequences [of Chernobyl] as a single, "easy to understand" estimation of excess cancer deaths...will inevitably provide a gross oversimplification of the breadth of human suffering experienced'. (5)
The 'sheer range of health impacts' - from thyroid cancer to psychiatric disorders - allows Greenpeace both to inflate death counts and to dismiss their significance. The numbers that Greenpeace drums up, however, are based on data in the official Belarusian health statistics, and estimates of radiation exposure in various regions of Belarus - estimates made by MV Malko, of the Joint Institute of Power and Nuclear Research, Belarus National Academy of Sciences. These estimates, made in 2006, are quoted in the Greenpeace report, but the source is not referenced.
Can these estimates be justified? It's hard to see why. Nobody would now want to join the old Soviet authorities' dismissal of the effects of Chernobyl. But the fact is that the collapse of the Soviet health system after the end of the Cold War undoubtedly made general health - especially in a weak Stalinist state like Belarus - deteriorate. To base future projections of deaths for the whole of Russia on the situation in Belarus today, and to lay them all on Chernobyl 20 years ago, is foolhardy.
The Ukrainian authorities seek international financial support for the plight of their country, and nobody can blame them - or Belarus - for that. But Greenpeace also wants to say that the 'most vulnerable population groups' in 2006 include 'the people in the former USSR but also in Sweden, Norway, UK and a number of other countries in Europe - in order of [sic] several hundred thousands - who consumed and continue to consume foodstuffs contaminated as a result of the accident' (6). Where will Chernobyl end? Apparently, its effects have reached British bellies.
In pursuit of international financial support, charities and non-governmental organisations in Ukraine play up the fallout from Chernobyl - enough to get general medical resources into the bargain. In pursuit of its anti-nuclear politics, it seems that Greenpeace will stretch any statistic as far as it sees fit. Chernobyl remains environmentalism's clinching argument against nuclear power, and a Chernobyl-meets-911-hijackers scenario its imagined nuclear apocalypse. Why? Because it is the only fatal nuclear accident they can point to. They have taken the exception and made it the rule.
This inflation of the facts is rather dismissive of the memory of the firefighters and workers who did die as a result of acute radiation sickness from Chernobyl - 28 in 1986 and a further 19 thereafter, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) (7). Of course, the suffering caused by the Chernobyl disaster goes further than 47 deaths. But it does not extend infinitely, as false sentimentalism would have us believe.
(1) Dana Centre
(2) Supporters of Nuclear Energy
(3) The Chernobyl catastrophe: consequences for human health, Greenpeace, 18 April
(4) Health effects of the Chernobyl accident and special care programmes, WHO, Geneva, September 2005
(5) Greenpeace, op cit, p18.
(6) Ibid, pp20, 21.
(7) WHO, op cit, p99.
Posted by bhola at 06:19 AM | Comments (0)
Lessons from Chernobyl
Ceri Au, Maisoneuve Magazine, April 27, 2006
Once an obscure town of little note, 80 miles north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Chernobyl was catapulted onto the front pages of newspapers and into the vernacular of global citizens with the catastrophic events of April 26, 1986. The explosion at the town’s nuclear power plant that day would come to be known as the worst nuclear accident in history. Releasing more than four hundred times the amount of radiation caused by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the Chernobyl disaster killed only thirty firemen and emergency workers in its immediate aftermath, but thousands more died in subsequent years (estimates vary between 9,000 according to the World Health Organization, and 90,000 according to Greenpeace). At 1:23 a.m. yesterday, exactly 20 years after the explosion, church bells rang out across Kiev and Moscow, as thousands flocked to the streets to reflect on the tragedy that reshaped a nation. No longer merely a geographic location, the very word Chernobyl evokes a visceral response in many, one that undermines the legitimacy of harnessing nuclear power in the face of such dire consequences. With sky-rocketing gas prices at the pump, the constant ideological tug-of-war over the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and calls by world leaders to research alternative energy sources, attention has once again returned to the promise of nuclear power.
On last night’s edition of The National, Margo McDiarmid explored the current public flirtation with nuclear power projects. According to Tom Adams of Energy Probe, a consumer environmental research organization, the recent debate about a return to nuclear power is merely “a fad.” Yet China alone hopes to build thirty-five reactors in the coming year. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is offering financial incentives to investors in nuclear power; and the Ontario government is considering adding an a dozen more nuclear power plants to its current stable. Alberta also wants a plant to meet the energy demands of extracting oil from its tarsands. But of course the quest for a balance between energy and the environment doesn’t end with nuclear power. In the Post, Paul Vieira delves into recent musing by the Conservative government that would see Canada join the so-called AP6, a group formed last year by non- Kyoto signatories to develop and build technology aimed at curbing carbon emissions. Despite critics calling Kyoto’s targets impossible, environmental analysts warn that the AP6 should not become a substitute for Kyoto, but simply another tool in the international arsenal to protect the environment. Going beyond the typical green rhetoric, an editorial in today’s Citizen argues the West’s addiction to oil indirectly supports radical Islamic terrorism, and calls on leaders looking for legacies to champion “conservation and efficiency as a patriotic duty.” But while politicians and activists wanting to save the planet duke it out, it’s up to ordinary citizens to make environmentally responsible choices in their own lives. Whether it is by taking public transport or riding a bike to work, the everyday choices of citizens will create a culture of concern, one that will embarrass politicians into making environmental issues a priority and not an after-thought.
Posted by bhola at 06:17 AM | Comments (0)
Armenian Chernobyl victims still suffering
Twenty years on, a new generation of children is not getting the treatment it needs for Chernobyl-related sickness.
Marianna Grigorian and Gayane Mkrtchian in Yerevan, 27 April 2006
The skin of Sennik Alexanian has a strange yellow hue to it, his bones stick out and his eyes bulge. Alexanian is only 49 but his immune system has collapsed. Like thousands of his compatriots he divides his life into two periods - before and after Chernobyl.
Along with 3,000 Armenians - and tens of thousands of people from across the Soviet Union - Alexanian was sent to help clear up the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine twenty years ago. Half of the Armenians sent there have severe health problems caused by the radiation they suffered and 350 of them have died.
On April 25, a group of Armenian rescuers were presented with awards by the prime minister Andranik Margarian. He promised them greater support, but many say the government of independent Armenia has let them down.
“I went to work and they did not let me in,” recalled Alexanian, who worked as a driver in 1986. “They put us in a train and didn’t tell me or my family where they were sending me. If I hadn’t gone and I’d run away, they’d have put me on trial as an enemy of the people.”
The rescuers were not told about the invisible dangers of the zone they were entering.
“Radiation does not have a smell or a colour, you can’t define it,” said Alexanian. “We just started feeling unwell and had constant headaches and dizziness and everyone had constant nose bleeds.”
Gevorg Vardanian, now chairman of the Armenian Chernobyl Association, spent eleven months in Chernobyl in total and suffers from serious radiation sickness.
“In Ukraine, the public didn’t know what had happened and during the May Day parade radioactive rain fell on people,” he recalled. “The most terrible thing was that there were students amongst those who brought people out of Chernobyl. They had no idea they had been brought into a disaster zone.”
Six years after the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet Union broke up and the rescuers became the responsibility of the new independent states such as Armenia. But unlike many other countries, Armenia has not allocated substantial funds for the medical treatment of Chernobyl survivors. Although entitled to free medical check-ups twice a year, the sufferers say they generally do not get even these.
Alexanian says his health is deteriorating every day but he has not been given the money to treat his illnesses. His family has sold everything they could, including their apartment. He receives a pension of 21,000 drams, equivalent to 46 US dollars, every month, but says he needs far more than that to pay for even one of the medicines he needs.
“When we apply to the appropriate offices hoping for help, they tell us sarcastically ‘You shouldn’t have gone’, but it wasn’t up to us,” said Alexanian. “No one went knowingly to a slow death.”
Six years ago he and his wife had a son, but the effects of Chernobyl left their mark on the baby too. Little Vachagan was born with chronic health problems and suffers from epilepsy and nervous fits.
Gevorg Vardanian says that most of the Armenian rescuers are no longer fit for work. They live in poor conditions and lack the money for their basic needs.
“We thought the troubles that began for us in Chernobyl would end in Armenia, but it seems there is no end to them,” said Vardanian.
“Not just the rescuers, but more than thirty per cent of their children suffer from a whole host of defects and have serious health problems. Many don’t even have the chance to take their children to the doctor.”
Vardanian says that the Armenian government has been particularly lax in its responsibilities, “We have no special law which defends the rights of those who took part in the Chernobyl emergency and gives them the benefits that others from all over the former Soviet Union are receiving.”
According to Vardanian, the Armenian government ratified a treaty undertaking to pass a special law to protect Chernobyl survivors, but since then no such law has been adopted.
Only at the beginning of this year did the parliamentary commission on social issues, health and the environment draw up a draft law that would guarantee the welfare of the Chernobyl victims and their children.
“The draft law is being discussed,” said Gagik Mkheyan, head of the commission.
However, the bill is already being criticised by government ministries.
“In our opinion, Armenia does not need a law like this,” Jemma Baghdasarian, head of the department for the problems of invalids and the elderly at the labour ministry, told IWPR, arguing that the Chernobyl survivors are sufficiently well looked after by current welfare legislation.
Nikolai Hovhannissian, head of Armenia’s Centre for Radioactive Medicine and Burns, says he understands the concerns of the Chernobyl rescuers, but that Armenia simply cannot afford to look after them.
“The state envisages spending 100,000 drams (222 dollars) on each sick person, which includes the cost of the electricity used by the hospital, the salaries of the medical staff, medicine, food,” said Hovhannissian. “What can you say? This amount is not enough to solve even a part of the problems of the sufferers.”
The survivors themselves say they have pinned hopes on the new law and that existing social provision is woefully inadequate.
“We have the impression that everyone is against us, we are like walking corpses, whom no one needs,” said Vazgen Gyurjinian, a Chernobyl survivor.
Gyurjinian, an electrician, was 28 when he was sent to the Chernobyl disaster zone. Now 46, he talks in a hoarse voice and is short of breath. He has had three heart attacks. His third daughter Lusine, born on his return, was an invalid at birth and gets just 3,600 drams (around eight dollars) a month in state benefit.
“It’s not just us, who are unsuited for life by now, who need this law, but our children and grandchildren,” said Gyurjinian. “Maybe some of us have healthy children but that does not guarantee us from sick grandchildren. Our genes have been damaged.”
Marianna Grigorian and Gayane Mkrtchian are reporters fro Armenianow.com in Yerevan.
Posted by bhola at 06:09 AM | Comments (0)
Chernobyl : 20 years on
IT has now been two decades since the world's biggest nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, and effects are still being felt. Then in the former USSR, now in Ukraine, the town is still a black-spot for radiation sickness.
On April 26th, 1986, due to the negligence of the operators and an inherently unsafe design, a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded. This was one of four reactors, and during testing numerous safety procedures had been disregarded.
At 1.23am, an out of control chain reaction created explosions and a fireball, which blew off the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid. This caused the release of clouds of radioactive particles.
Over 30 people were killed immediately; and perilously high levels of radiation in the surrounding 20-mile radius led to the evacuation of approximately 135,000 people.
The worst contamination occurred in large parts of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The radiation has spread as far as the UK, and even parts of the US. Four hundred times as much radiation escaped from the reactor as was caused by the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima.
No-one will ever really know the exact death toll attributable to the disaster, and many of the consequent cancer deaths will not yet have occurred. The World Health Organisation (WHO) calculated that there were 56 direct deaths; and estimate 9,000 subsequent fatalities, from cancer and related diseases.
Greenpeace have claimed that this is a grossly underestimated figure. They estimate a total death toll of 93,000; but cite in their report "The most recently published figures indicate that in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine alone the accident could have resulted in an estimated 200,000 additional deaths in the period between 1990 and 2004".
Despite still emitting dangerous levels of radiation, the 800-year-old city just about survives to this day. Hundreds of - mostly elderly - people decided to brave the danger and returned to the zone. In 1987, the population was around 1,200. In 2003, it was more like 300. In 2004, government workers went to police the zone, and clear up radioactive material.
The disaster initially did the wildlife no favours. An area of pine forest covering four square kilometres went orange and died. However, in more recent years, animals have been reintroduced into the 'dead zone', which circles the reactor at a radius of 30km. This attempt to rejuvinate the ecosystem has worked surprisingly well, with numerous species of animals flourishing. It hasn't worked well for all animals; but - despite some evidence of genetic mutation - the myth concerning animals growing two heads has been debunked.
Despite some adaptation, the disaster still causes a good deal of sickness in humans. To this day, a worldwide effort persists to ease the suffering of its victims. pembrokeshiretv.com recently covered the efforts made by the North Pembrokeshire Link of the Chernobyl Children's Lifeline, when fourteen children visited Pembrokeshire from Belarus. The holiday was to spare them the bitter Belarusian winter, and gave their immune systems a much-needed boost.
The North Pembrokeshire Link - formed in 2002, and one of over 140 in the UK - are fundraising again on the 20th anniversary of the disaster - this time for a children's hospice movement in Belarus. Co-founder Carol Alabaster said:
"The hospice in Belarus is rather crowded, and really could use some more facilities. We felt they deserved having our attention turned to them". The collection is being kept low-key, and not turned into an event. However, they have already received a generous donation raised at the Fishguard and Goodwick Rotary Austerity Lunch.
THE Chernobyl explosion may have happened two decades ago, but the effects are still being felt in Welsh upland farming today. In fact 359 of the 375 farms still operating under restriction in the UK today are in Wales.
After the explosion in 1986, a contaminated plume of fallout swept across the globe. Contrary to some of the weather predictions at the time, the plume reached the UK after 5 days. Areas of Cumbria, southwest Scotland, Northern Ireland and North Wales were contaminated when the plume coincided with rain showers; resulting in deposition of radionuclides in the soil. Hence there was a scattering of radioactive 'hotspots'.
Immediately afterwards, a countrywide programme of milk and foodstuff monitoring was initiated. This initially pinpointed the hotspot areas, allowing for a more detailed study. Results showed that lamb and mutton was a particular cause for concern, as was milk. Fish taken from upland lakes are still monitored to this day.
The main type of isotopes that are causing the protracted farming restriction are radiocaesium particles - particularly Caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years. This was deposited predominantly through rainfall, and was ingested by lifestock who ate contaminated vegetation.
In areas with a high level of clay in the soil, this posed less of a problem, as the particles tended to stick to the clay and were not absorbed by vegetation. However, upland soil tends to be less clay-rich, and these were the areas in which a higher level of contamination found its way into the food chain.
Once in the food chain, the contaminated particles remain in meat, and can still be passed back to the land through excreta from contaminated animals. If contaminated meat is eaten by humans, it can easily pass to them.
Nowadays, the animals in the restricted farming areas have to be live-monitored to test their levels of radioactivity. There has been less than a 1% failure rate in upland animals since the mid 1990s. However, animals under restriction still cannot be sold or moved freely. They may not be slaughtered for human consumption; or indeed any foodstuff preparation, including pet food.
Testing is vital, and has become part of everyday life for the affected farmers. Stock must be 100% safe before it can be allowed back into the food chain.
Farmers are paid compensation for stock found to be contaminated. However, the Farmers Union of Wales recently called for a review of the amount which they receive per animal; the figure of £1.30 per ewe has remained unchanged since 1986.
This restricted area covers around 530km2, primarily between Dolgellau in the south and Conwy in the north. In this area, approximately 180,000 sheep are affected by the restriction.
It is possible for areas to be de-restricted if levels of contamination drop significantly. Speaking on Radio Four's Today programme yesterday, Dr Nick Beresford of Lancaster University, who was responsible for a good deal of the testing 20 years ago, said that contamination modelling in Cumbria suggested that monitoring would become non-essential in about ten years time.
However, due to a much higher failure rate, and larger area of restriction in North Wales - particularly around Snowdonia - ten years time would seem far too hopeful. There have been no de-restrictions in Wales since 1997. As much of the land around Snowdonia is high, remote, and abundant in common land, it is considerably more difficult to stop any spread.
Nevertheless, the Food Standards Agency are satisfied that there are more than adequate systems in place to ensure that contaminated livestock does not enter the food chain. Through the safeguards in place, consumers are highly unlikely to ever be exposed to unacceptable levels of radioactivity. Yet it seems that, for many farmers, live monitoring of restricted stock will remain a way of life for many years to come.
Posted by bhola at 06:03 AM | Comments (0)
Former Soviet leader Gorbachev recalls day of Chernobyl disaster
Stephen Brown
Geneva (ENI). Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has told an interfaith gathering his life has never been the same since the day in 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded creating the world's worst nuclear disaster. "The disaster was a shocking reminder of the reality of nuclear threats and it has become a symbol of modern technological risks," Gorbachev said in his message to a 26 April gathering at the headquarters of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
In his written message, Gorbachev said he had been awakened by a phone call at 5 a.m. informing him of the accident at the nuclear power station in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union.
"My life has never been the same since," he told the meeting attended by representatives of Geneva's Jewish, Islamic and Christian communities.
Gorbachev was Soviet communist party leader from 1985 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. He is now chairman of Green Cross International, a Geneva-based ecology group he founded in 1993 which organised the interfaith gathering with the WCC.
"For the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl revealed the cataclysmic potential of nuclear disasters, whether deliberate or accidental, and raised questions that remain pertinent and largely unresolved," the former Soviet leader said.
Gorbachev said "government transparency" was of "utmost importance", and he urged a stepping up of renewable energy programmes.
The world had learned the truth about the Chernobyl disaster because of the policies of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring) he introduced as Soviet leader, he asserted.
"Had this not been the case, the facts and implications would have been hidden, disguised or devalued," Gorbachev said.
World Council of Churches' general secretary, the Rev. Samuel Kobia, warned about the "growing energy hunger of expanding economies" and of increasing calls for new nuclear power plants and new generations of nuclear weapons.
"The thirst for energy of the highly industrialised and fast industrialising societies drives leaders to undertake projects that could threaten both peace and the future of life," he said.
Kobia urged leaders of different faiths to commit themselves to "inter-religious dialogue and co-operation for justice, peace and the future of life on our planet earth".
Posted by bhola at 06:01 AM | Comments (0)
U.N. reflects on Chernobyl
By Lauren Mack Apr 27, 2006, 18:47 GMT
UNITED NATIONS, United States (UPI) -- On the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl, the United Nations remembered the tragedy and reflected on what is being done to prevent a repeat accident.
Several U.N. agencies honored the emergency workers, victims both living and deceased, and the volunteers who have worked to clean up the affected regions on Wednesday, the 20th anniversary of the world`s worst nuclear accident.
'Many hard lessons have been learned from Chernobyl, including the importance of providing the public with transparent, timely and credible information in the event of a catastrophe,' said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
On April 26, 1986, the Unit 4 reactor core at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, was destroyed by explosions which sent a cloud of radio nuclides, or radioactive atoms, over parts of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
An estimated 350,000 workers charged with cleaning up the site were exposed to high levels of radiation, said a World Health Organization report recently released to coincide with the anniversary. More than 330,000 people were displaced from their radiated homelands and faced the stigma of being contaminated.
Today, five million people continue to live in contaminated areas, said a WHO report entitled 'Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programs.'
Since the disaster there has been an increase in thyroid cancer diagnoses, most of which can be linked directly to the nuclear power plant disaster, said the report. In the days following the accident, high levels of radioactive iodine were released and deposited in nearby pastures where cows grazed. The iodine was concentrated in the cows` milk which was then given to children. A general iodine deficiency in the local diet compounded the problem and caused more iodine to accumulate in the children`s thyroids, the report said.
'Since radioactive iodine is short lived, if people had stopped giving locally supplied contaminated milk to children for a few months following the accident, it is likely that most of the increase in radiation-induced thyroid cancer would not have resulted,' said the WHO.
Some 5,000 victims, who were children at the time of the accident, have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer so far.
Two decades later, survivors are not only dealing with health problems but many are still suffering economic hardship from resettlement, economic restrictions imposed after Chernobyl and dislocation following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, said the U.N. Development Program, which has coordinated all Chernobyl related activities for the United Nations since 2004.
The lack of accurate information from the Russian government about the affects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident in the months and years that followed the accident has prompted organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency to call for improved communication after a disaster strikes. The agency marked this year`s anniversary by reminding the global community about the hazards of nuclear activity.
'We should never forget the lessons we learned regarding nuclear safety and international cooperation. In remembering the Chernobyl accident, we should renew our determination to ensure that such a tragedy will not happen again,' said IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei in Vienna.
The U.N. shifted its Chernobyl strategy from emergency relief to long-term recovery and development in 2002.
There is a need for improved international communication and cooperation, safe food production and health care, said the Chernobyl Forum, a group of representatives from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and eight U.N. agencies formed in 2003. The group was formed to look at the impact of Chernobyl on health and the environment, presenting its findings culled from hundreds of scientists, economists and health experts last September.
Several U.N. agencies have established volunteer programs to help address the lingering economic, environmental and social problems. As part of the Chernobyl Recovery and Development Program, a joint initiative of the Ukrainian government and U.N. agencies, more than 200 community organizations have been set up in 139 villages including one in Kirdany, a Ukrainian village which helped rebuild the fresh water supply system. Other organizations are helping to renovate schools, build new health facilities and create youth centers.
'By encouraging residents to take fate into their own hands, we are confident we are helping to build sturdy local foundations for a robust democracy,' said UNDP Regional Director Kalman Mizsei.
'The secretary-general believes that the best way for the international community to pay homage to those who suffered from Chernobyl is to provide generous support to programs designed to help traumatized communities regain self-sufficiency, and affected families resume normal, healthy lives,' said Dujarric, Annan`s spokesman.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
Posted by bhola at 05:59 AM | Comments (0)
50 years later, victims of Minamata Disease still fight for justice
New America Media, Commentary, Christopher Reed, Apr 26, 2006
Photo, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath by W. Eugene Smith, Minamata, 1972, courtesy of Masters of Photography
On May 1, Japan will take long-overdue steps to more fully recognize a neurological disease caused by industrial pollution in Minamata Bay.
TOKYO--Like a war widow, 74-year-old Sumiko Kaneko still remembers her husband, who died when she was only 25, and her younger boy, who did not survive infancy. Today she cares for her eldest son, now 50, who has lived a wheelchair for the last nine years.
Kaneko did not suffer her losses in war, but from a terrible illness that afflicts her, too. It is Minamata disease, caused by manufacturing pollution in Japan, and an international symbol of the dangers of unchecked industrial development in the modern world.
On May 1, Japan marks the 50th anniversary of the first official report of what would later emerge as the years-long dumping of tons of highly dangerous organic mercury into Minamata Bay by a chemical firm. The pollution blighted the lives of thousands, killed many hundreds and has yet to be resolved. A ceremony will be held Monday, when prime minister Junichiro Koizumi will apologize.
But like Japan's belated attempts to atone for World War II atrocities, sorrowful words will not satisfy. Still angry at decades of evasion, lies and intimidation are the government-certified 2,995 afflicted, relatives of the 1,784 dead, the 16,289 unrecognized claimants and possibly two million damaged in some way by the neurological disorder (all statistics open to challenge, because of conflicting accounts).
The anniversary marks the day an official of the small town of Minamata on the west coast of Japan's southern island of Kyushu received a formal report of four patients suffering a mysterious malady. The sickness caused numbness, eyesight loss, tremors, difficulty walking, extreme stabbing pains, lapses of consciousness, severe convulsions, coma and sometimes death.
But residents were suspicious before May 1, 1956. The disease had already provoked the deaths of dozens of Minamata's pet cats, who hurled themselves off jetties. Then, people were behaving strangely, shouting and acting crazy. All of them -- including the cats -- had something in common. They ate lots of local fish.
Already some residents were pointing fingers at the only industry in the locality other than fishing, the powerful Chisso corporation and its large petro-chemical factory by Minamata Bay. It had been there under changing titles since 1906, making fertilizer and, since 1941, vinyl chloride, a process involving a compound of mercury. Chisso was known to have dumped tons of waste sludge into the bay; local fishermen had long complained.
Soon after the first report, it was discovered that 17 people in the area had died. A medical research team at nearby Kumamoto University was alerted, but two years later no definitive cause had been found. One difficulty was a local taboo on speaking ill of Chisso, the major employer. Even though mercury was a suspect, the firm kept its use of the compound a secret, while attacking the research.
Finally in 1959, the team published an interim report blaming mercury, but by then local fishermen were out of business as more people became ill and seafood was suspected. That November, as Chisso resisted compensation payments, the fishermen rioted, broke into the company and destroyed equipment. The Tokyo media awoke to the dire events in faraway Kyushu.
But as the years passed, Chisso continued to obstruct and resist, abandoning the mercury compound only in 1968. The local government also prevaricated, and government ministries in Tokyo did not help -- in fact they hindered, terminating the university research grant, for instance. It was even suggested the disease had run its course.
Minamata disease was not a passing affliction, however. People continued to fall ill and die. In 1965, a second, smaller outbreak erupted in northern Niigata prefecture, caused by another chemical firm.
The Ministry of Health finally officially recognized the disease and its cause in 1968. Yet still, despite court cases and political action, such as a "camp out" at Chisso's Tokyo headquarters, obtaining redress was slow. Not until 1977 were government-recognized criteria established to define a sufferer, but this remains controversial even today.
In 1988, the Supreme Court overturned the appeal against a 1979 guilty verdict on Chisso executives for corporate malfeasance, but they were not imprisoned. The company paid out millions of dollars over the years, but new lawsuits against the criteria system still proliferate. Only in 2004 did the Supreme Court finally uphold a lawsuit by 45 plaintiffs.
A new screening system for Minamata entitlements is to be formed -- starting in 2007. And on April 25 the Japanese parliament's lower house passed a resolution calling for increased government help -- its first such action.
Nobuo Miyazawa, a journalist who has followed the case for years, offers a chilling verdict: "...all the parties except the victims, making excuses and avoiding what they needed to do ... Minamata is a disease that was willfully inflicted."
Posted by bhola at 01:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2006
Measuring Chernobyl's fallout
WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 27, 2006
How many people died because of the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor explosion, which spewed radiation across northern Europe? Twenty years after the accident, the death toll remains in dispute.
This month, the World Health Organization estimated "up to" 9,000 people died or will die of cancer because of the incident, which unfolded in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986. The number was 6,700 to 38,000 in a recent report published in a peer-reviewed journal, from the Lyon, France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer, an agency governed by the WHO and 16 member nations. Greenpeace International, which opposes nuclear power, published its own report, based partly on papers from former Soviet nations. Greenpeace estimates the death toll is between 93,000 and 200,000, including cancer deaths and other illnesses like immunity disorders.
The wide range reflects lingering uncertainty about the health effects of such disasters. In the case of Chernobyl, the initial blast, and efforts to contain it, killed 31 people. But, through the air, food and water, the fallout exposed roughly 600,000 residents and relief workers to very high doses of radiation, and six million more to lower but still severe doses. Potentially hundreds of millions more were exposed to radiation at some level, which is why some researchers study all 570 million Europeans at the time of the accident.
All the Chernobyl studies base death tolls on the health effects from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- where most people suffered acute, short-term exposure. And even those bombings remain poorly understood: Although survivors have been closely tracked for most of the subsequent six decades, important data were lost in the first years after the 1945 bombings. Other information on radiation's effects, from U.S. veterans involved in atomic testing and from medical patients who receive radiation treatments, also reflects short-term, high-dose exposure and therefore isn't fully applicable to Chernobyl.
"There is a very big controversy on the effects of low doses of radiation," Elisabeth Cardis, head of the radiation institute at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, told me. Her group's estimate of deaths (between 6,700 and 38,000) has such a wide range because it relied in part on data from the Japan bombings, an imperfect model. (Her agency has looked for more reliable statistics on the effects of radiation -- it recently studied 400,000 nuclear-industry workers and found that their cancer risk was reasonably well-predicted by the models based on Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.)
Because of this great uncertainty, the WHO didn't count any possible deaths from low-dose exposure, focusing instead on the six million people closest to Chernobyl. "Any time you're looking at numbers that have to do with low-dose radiation, it's speculative" because of the dearth of studies on the health effects of low-dose radiation, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told me.
An announcement last September from the Chernobyl Forum, a group including the WHO, the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the U.N.'s nuclear-energy agency -- and six other U.N. agencies put the death toll at 4,000, though it only looked at the 600,000 people who were most exposed. Michael Repacholi, manager of WHO's radiation program, said at the time, "the sum total of the Chernobyl Forum is a reassuring message." That initial announcement sparked criticism for excluding millions of people who were also exposed. Since then, WHO has also acknowledged the possibility of up to 5,000 more deaths that may be attributable to Chernobyl.
Keith Baverstock, a former WHO researcher who studies radiation at the University of Kuopio in Finland, told me in an email, "There is no excuse for the WHO/IAEA ignoring these fatal cancers" outside the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl. He added, "If we cannot believe that WHO tells us the truth about health issues it is a pretty poor outlook for public health."
Greenpeace, sparked by the September announcement, brought together more than 50 scientists -- mostly from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, the most-affected nations -- to write a report compiling papers published in regional medical journals. Ivan Blokov, leader of Greenpeace's Chernobyl project and an editor of the report, told me that the report is "scientifically based," with no political statements.
However, the report relied heavily on some questionable methods. It assumed that Chernobyl was responsible for an overall increase in cancer rates, but Chernobyl's effect on those rates is difficult to isolate from other factors, such as changes in smoking rates and improvements in the diagnosis of cancer. Also, researchers wanted to estimate how many people exposed to Chernobyl radiation developed cancer other than thyroid cancer, which usually isn't fatal. To do so, they studied how cancer rates rose in post-war Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and looked at the ratio of thyroid cancers to other cancers in those cases. They applied a similar ratio for Chernobyl. But Japan's overall cancer rates differ from Europe's -- Japan has a higher rate of stomach cancer but a lower rate of lung cancer, for instance -- so it's not clear the same ratios would hold true.
Mikhail Malko, a contributor to the Greenpeace report and a researcher at the Joint Institute of Power and Nuclear Research in Minsk, Belarus, outlined the ratios method to me in an email. "According to my assumption, ratios of radiation risks have to be similar for all ethnic groups of humans," he wrote, acknowledging that this is a weakness of his approach. Dr. Cardis said she needed to study Dr. Malko's approach further, but based on her initial analysis, she called it "interesting," but "fairly crude." The WHO's Mr. Hartl, meanwhile, dismissed the Greenpeace report, saying Greenpeace "took the reports that we rejected."
Posted by bhola at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)
20 years on: the horrors of Chernobyl still linger
ALLAN LAING - GLASGOW HERALD - April 27 2006
IT happened 20 years ago and 1500 miles away, yet the dark spectre of the Chernobyl disaster still hangs across the land.
Even in Scotland, Some 10 farms remain under restrictions because of the lingering radioactive fall-out.
The people of Ukraine yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of the nuclear power plant explosion which spewed clouds of radioactivity over huge swathes of Russia and Europe.
Viktor Yushchenko, the country's president, joined survivors and relatives of the victims at a ceremony of remembrance as close as safety would allow to the Chernobyl reactor, still covered by its ugly protective sarcophagus. Beneath the concrete cover is the deadly remains of human folly.
In Slavutych, the town created to house the "refugee" workforce and their families after the world's worst nuclear accident, hundreds filed slowly through the streets.
At precisely 1.23am local time – the very minute the explosion and fire occurred on April 26, 1986 – a respectful silence ensued, broken only by the eerie toll of a single bell and alarm sirens.
In Scotland, meanwhile, the anniversary was not far from the thoughts of the farming community. The ill winds brought radioactivity east from Chernobyl and showered contaminated rain upon the land. The UK was not spared.
At the time, the public was assured that the effects would be negligible in a matter of a few weeks. Such assurances were far from the mark.
Ten farms in Scotland, most of them in Stirlingshire and East Ayrshire, remain under restrictions. It could still take several years before they are given the all-clear, according to the Food Standards Agency.
James Withers, deputy chief executive of the National Farmers' Union in Scotland, said yesterday: "It is incredible that a small number of Scottish farms are still under restriction, 20 years on. The initial advice was that the effects would be over in a few weeks, which seems laughable now.
"Around 2000 farms were originally placed under restriction and we're now down to a handful.
"But it is impossible to know when we will finally escape Chernobyl's legacy. It is extremely frustrating for the individual farmers still caught up in restrictions.
"Farmers do have access to a compensation scheme and the general view is that it is a fair reflection of the losses these businesses have faced."
Under the restrictions, sheep and lambs at the farms are checked for radioactive caesium-137. If they exceed the safety limit the farmers have to mark them with indelible paint, move them to different pastures and wait until they fall below the limit. Only then can they be sent for slaughter and enter the food chain.
Back in Slavutych, a middle-aged man who bore witness to the events all those years ago wiped tears from his eyes and shook his head in disbelief as he stood alongside a group of teenage mourners, too young to remember the tragedy.
Ukraine has been left to deal with a legacy of ill health among its people and a reactor that, though entombed in its concrete coffin, will remain radioactive for centuries.
Soviet authorities took two days to inform the world about the accident, which was caused by human error. Firefighters and soldiers were sent in to extinguish the fire and clean up radioactive material, some equipped only with shovels.
Thousands of people suffered health problems from the radiation. The sarcophagus is leaking and is to be replaced – at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds.
The World Health Organisation puts at 9000 the number of people expected to die due to radiation exposure from Chernobyl, while Greenpeace predicts an eventual death toll of 93,000.
Posted by bhola at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)
Ukraine remembers Chernobyl blast 20 years on
Updated Wed. Apr. 26 2006 11:51 PM ET - CTV.ca News Staff
View of the gray cracked and crumbling sarcophagus covering Chernobyl nuclear power plant's damaged Reactor No. 4. The reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, spewing radioactive clouds across much of Europe. (image: IAEA)
Bells tolled and sirens sounded in Ukraine Wednesday morning, marking the 20th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.
Dozens of mourners carrying candles and red carnations gathered about 15 kilometres from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where an explosion on April 26, 1986 spewed radiation across many parts of Europe.
Ukrainians light candles to commemorate those who died after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster during a ceremony at the memorial to Chernobyl firefighters in the city of Slavutich. (AP / Oded Balilty)
The lethal radioactive blaze lasted for 10 days and affected the health of millions of people.
Parliament opened a special session Wednesday dedicated to the accident.
Deputy Emergency Minister Volodymyr Kholosha promised his department's task "is above all directed at the people affected, their livelihood, their health, their security."
About 4,000 people still work in the most highly contaminated zone, but for no more than two weeks at a time.
Ukrainian students try on gas masks as part of a safety drill in a school in Rudniya, just outside the Chernobyl contamination zone on Monday April 3, 2006. The world will mark the 20th anniversary today. (AP / Oded Balilty)
Debate still rages today as to how many people will die as a direct result of the radioactivity.
A recent report from the United Nations said only 65 people -- 50 firefighters battling the fallout and 15 schoolchildren who developed thyroid cancer -- were directly linked to the accident.
The UN predicted the death toll from cancers caused by radiation would climb to 9,000 in the years to come.
However, environmental groups including Greenpeace argue that number should be 10 times higher. They estimate 93,000 deaths can be directly linked to Chernobyl and accuse the UN of whitewashing the long-term effects of the accident.
Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko lays flowers at a memorial monument of Chernobyl victims during a night ceremony on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster in the early hours of Wednesday n Kyiv, Ukraine. (AP / Efrem Lukatsky)
In the capital of Kyiv, hundreds visited memorials as bells tolled at exactly 1:23 a.m., the precise moment reactor No. 4 erupted 20 years ago.
"My friends were dying under my eyes," said Konstantyn Sokolov, 68, a former Chernobyl worker whose voice was hoarse from throat and lip cancer.
"I try not to recollect my memories. They are very terrible," Sokolov told The Associated Press.
Mike Ryndzak, who now lives in Ottawa, was 19 years old and in the military when he was assigned to the Chernobyl site a month after the explosion to help with the cleanup.
Ryndzak said he didn't know exactly what radiation was, but knew it was bad.
"Radiation spread caused a panic among the population, mainly in my mind because of the unknown. I associated the word radiation with demon, something ... you cannot see, you cannot touch, you cannot smell, but it yet it goes through across your body," he told CTV's Canada AM Wednesday.
"It was a difficult experience because I was preparing myself, basically, to die. I had no idea I would be alive 20 years later .... It's a horrible experience thinking about death at the age of 19."
Mykola Malyshev, 66, was working in the control room of Chernobyl's reactor No. 1 at the time of the explosion. He said the lights flickered and the room shook. The workers were ordered to the destroyed reactor, but when they got there, their co-workers ordered them to flee and save themselves.
"They told us, 'We are already dead. Go away,'" he said.
In Slavutych, a town built to house displaced Chernobyl workers, commemorations began an hour earlier to coincide with Moscow time, which was used in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the time of the accident.
Many believe the Chernobyl blast contributed to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse.
The powerful blast, which followed a capacity test and occurred when the plant's safety system was temporarily shut off, blew the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid and sent the radioactivity across a 77,220-square-mile radius of the then-Soviet Union and Europe.
Thousands have since been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, one of the only internationally accepted illnesses linked to Chernobyl.
Ryndzak said his health has been affected. He has had to have work done on more than a dozen teeth, and he says scars and bruises take a very long time to heal. Ryndzak said even mosquito bites leave a scar or blue spot for months.
About 350,000 people were evacuated from their homes following the explosion, never to return.
The nearby city of Pripyat -- where many Chernobyl workers lived -- along with dozens of villages, were left to decay. Experts say it will not be safe to live there again for centuries.
Five million people live in areas covered by the radioactive fallout, in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus and Russia.
Valentyna Abramovych, 50, her husband and their infant son were forced to evacuate their home in Pripyat. They were shuffled around, first to a nearby village then to a relative's house.
"Every day, I would watch television and expect to hear when we could come back," she said.
"When they said we could never come back, I burst into tears ... We feel like outcasts. No one needs us."
Lena Makarova, 27, chose to commemorate the tragedy at the Chernobyl museum in Kyiv.
"The whole country grieves and the whole world joins us in this grief," she said.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a statement Wednesday saying Canadians will continue to support those countries affected by the disaster.
Harper's government Tuesday announced another $8 million in aid, bringing Canada's total commitment for Chernobyl-related projects to $66.2 million.
"Canadians will not forget what happened 20 years ago on this day in Chernobyl, nor those whose health and livelihoods were so dramatically altered by the disaster," the statement read.
"The international community must continue to work together to ensure that a tragedy such as this never happens again."
With files from The Associated Press
Posted by bhola at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2006
Panel studies rising Chernobyl toll
April 30, 2006
BY DAVE NEWBART
Even though the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened 20 years ago last week, experts said Saturday some of the long-term health effects might just be beginning.
That's because the latency period for many cancers associated with radiation exposure is 10 to 15 years or more.
And research presented Saturday at a conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Public Health lends credence to that.
The new research by Alexei Okeanov, a specialist in oncology and epidemiology in Minsk, Belarus, showed that since 1997, emergency workers who responded to the Chernobyl crisis had a 23 percent higher risk than normal of developing tumors associated with several types of cancer.
While emergency workers clearly had the highest risk, residents living in contaminated areas in Belarus -- which is northwest of Chernobyl but received the most widespread radioactive fallout because of the prevailing winds -- had a 15 percent increase in such tumors. The risks were greater than predicted by other scientists, he said.
"It's quite high," he said, noting that it's only getting worse as they analyze more-recent data. "It's higher and higher every year."
Okeanov works closely with the Great Lakes Centers for Occupational Safety and Health at UIC, directed by Professor Daniel Hryhorczuk. UIC has a center in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, that manages data collection for several health studies in the area. The center has also helped train scientists there.
Aid effort 'late,' getting better
Those studies are important because children in the area have thyroid cancers at a rate 80 times higher than normal, according to the World Health Organization. And in the last decade, about 40,000 of the 350,000 workers sent to clean up the mess have died of leukemia, experts at the conference said. That includes one of Hryhorczuk's relatives.
Still, he said the disaster's impact went far beyond health.
Entire communities -- about 135,000 people -- were evacuated to other cities, where they were often stigmatized. Kids made fun of the evacuees, saying, "He glows in the dark," Hryhorczuk said.
"You have to look at the disaster in its totality," he said.
The Chernobyl plant's explosion and fire occurred April 26, 1986. It became the world's worst nuclear accident, sending radioactive fallout for 10 days over 77,220 square miles.
Hryhorczuk said the international aid effort was "late" but getting better. There are now plans to build a $1 billion shelter-- on top of a previous shelter that was poorly built -- to confine the contamination from the shuttered nuclear plant.
Daria Khan, a UIC engineering graduate who grew up in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood in Chicago, spent five years at Chernobyl as the project manager for several facilities built on or near the site and used for medical screening and training of workers. In some cases, workers train intensely for locations so contaminated they could only stay for 15 minutes -- a year -- before having to leave.
Khan, whose parents are from Ukraine, was proud of her work. "You always knew you were working for a special cause," she said.
Posted by bhola at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2006
Fallout - the human cost of nuclear catastrophe
4 April 2006
FALLOUT
Robert Knoth
Panos Pictures and Greenpeace present an exhibition of award-winning photographs by Robert Knoth to mark the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
The exhibition runs at the Oxo gallery in London from 18 April to 14 May
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Main photo (top)
Ainagul (6) has not grown since the age of three. Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.
Above left
Ramzes Faisullin (16) has hydrocephalus which causes painful pressure in his head Kurmanova, Russia
Above middle
Natasha Popova (12) and Vadim Kuleshov (8). Natasha was born with microcephaly, Vadim has a bone disease and a mental disorder. Veznova, Belarus.
Above right
Sarova Valentina Iranovna, 71 worked for the army in the closed city of Kurchatov. She became sterile and had a stroke. Kazakhstan.
Chernobyl was the world's worst nuclear accident, but its legacy is sadly not unique. A new exhibition of photographs by Robert Knoth documents life in the radioactive ruins of four nuclear disaster sites in the former Soviet Union.
With many governments now advocating a new generation of nuclear power stations, these photographs offer a timely and cautionary reminder of the terrible human costs of nuclear technology - and the deadly consequences when things go wrong.
Fallout: the human cost of nuclear catastrophe is showing at the gallery at Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London from 18 April - 14 May 2006. The exhibition is open daily from 11am to 6pm. Admission is free. www.oxotower.co.uk
Panos Pictures
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Posted by bhola at 01:31 PM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2006
The burning monument
Awene - By Bakhtiyar Ali
By Bakhtiyar Ali (Awene, March 28, 2006)
Until March 16, if anyone would have asked me about the most appalling political event in the past twenty years, I would have answered that it was on August 31, 1996 (when the Kurdistan Democratic Party asked Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces to help them defeat Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's militias in Erbil.) But what happened in March 16 was a political and ethical earthquake that was larger than August 31. Firstly, (March 16) marks the day that a generation emerged that can set monuments on fire. Secondly, a power that can shoot at children was born on that day. The most meaningless interpretation is (that the burning of the Halabja memorial) was like burning the history of Halabja, as party media says. On the contrary, nothing expresses Halabja's history like the burning of the monument.
Setting the monument on fire is simply like burning a small faction of the lies that have been repeated for the past fifteen years. It rejects the policy of worshipping the dead while those who are alive are treated like dogs. Halabja actually stood up when the monument was set on fire; it marked a revolution of the town, a revolution of which the public was previously unaware. The irony is that the ones who opened fire on kids and freedom of expression are the same ones now crying for the burnt monument. It is the biggest hypocrisy and ethical crises that you kill me while guarding my statue; that you cry for my past while stabbing me. The ones who open fire on secondary and university students and shoots at hundreds of unarmed people cannot say they love our statutes more than us. The policy of this (Iraqi Kurdish) administration is that for the sake of the monument they are ready to destroy Halabja; they are ready to kill dozens of people, to detain them and talk about executions.
(Awene is issued weekly by Awene Company in Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan.)
Posted by bhola at 03:06 AM | Comments (0)
Netherlands should finance medical project in Halabja
KurdishMedia.com - By Vladimir van Wilgenburg
The Dutch socialistic party SP requested Dutch Minister Van Ardenne (Development cooperation) to finance a medical project for the Kurdish victims of the chemical attack in Halabja. A health project of the KRG [Kurdish Regional Government], Liverpool university and several organizations is about to stop due to the lack of money.
Second Chamber member Krista van Velzen said that Holland has a special responsibility towards the victims, because the chemical ingredients came from the Dutch businessman, Frans van Anraat, who recently was convicted for supplying Saddam’s regime with chemicals used in the attacks on Halabja. “With a moderate contribution we can keep this project alive and show our commitment,” said the Dutch politician, who contributed to Van Anraat’s arrest and trial.
Victims of the Halabja attack have to face several diseases because of the chemicals. A small British project that was focused on battling birth defects and infant deaths is about to stop due a lack of money.
The attacks, which consisted of a cocktail of chemical and biological nerve and mustard agents, caused its victims DNA mutations, physical malformations, cancer, paralysis, birth defects, infant mortality, immediate and long-term neuropsychiatric damage, etc.
This project was successful and gave help and treatment to the victims.
The costs were about 100.000 euro a year. Infant mortality, cancer and birth defects were treated and taken care off, because of this project.
There was also scientific research into the cure for birth diffects.
Van Velzen thought it would be a pity, that there would come an end to this health care and scientific research project, because of insufficient money resources. “Health care in the Kurdish area is problematic.
Therefore health care for the victims of the chemical attacks isn’t sufficient. The Netherlands could make a good gesture towards the Kurdish people, by giving this support”
“The people of Kurdistan are still suffering because of the chemical attacks. Holland is morally obligated to contribute to medical research and medical care for the victims. I urge everyone to come to the memorial [Sunday Amsterdam] to show our solidarity with the victims. Let’s condemn this crime, what happened in Halabja, may never happen again,” said Van Velzen.
Recently angry protesters in Halabja destroyed the Halabja memorial museum. They asked for better public health services. According to the protestors, the Kurdish government isn’t doing enough to help the residents of Halabja.
Posted by bhola at 03:03 AM | Comments (0)
April 01, 2006
Kurds destroy Halabja memorial in protest
16 Mar 2006 15:37:14 GMT Source: Reuters
By Marwan Mohammed
HALABJA, Iraq, March 16 (Reuters) - Hundreds of Kurdish protesters destroyed a memorial to the 1988 gas attack in the Iraqi town of Halabja on Thursday, setting the museum ablaze on the 18th anniversary of the deaths of 5,000 local people.
A hospital official said one man was shot dead when a gathering to commemorate the attack turned into a protest over poor local services.
A local journalist working for Reuters said he saw police and Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen fire shots to disperse the protesters after they rampaged through the one-storey, circular museum that serves as a potent reminder of the 1988 attack.
The violence is likely to embarrass K