(529.5163) WISE Amsterdam - About 10 percent of the 300,000 Russian liquidators (emergency workers who helped in the cleanup and in building the sarcophagus to seal the destroyed reactor) have died. According to the Itar-Tass news agency which quoted information of the Russian ministry of Public Health some 38% of those 30,000 dead, committed suicide. The Russian ministry is only keeping track of the liquidators with the russian nationality. However, many people from Ukraine and the Baltic states (Lithaunia, Estonia and Latvia) were 'used'. According to the UN 2000 report a total of 600,000 people were sent to Chernobyl to fight the catastrophe. But in 1996, a UN report on the consequences of Chernobyl, estimated the number of liquidators at 800,000.
New UN report. The United Nations released a new assessment of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, saying the worst health consequences are yet to come. Seven million people in the Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation are still suffering the effects of Chernobyl explosion 14 years ago, including 3 million children who require phsycial treatment The booklet titled "Chernobyl: A Continuing Catastrophe" published late April by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the three countries most affected by the radiation continue to pay the price.
The number of those likely to develop serious medical conditions because of delayed reactions to radiation exposure will not be known until 2016, at the earliest according to the report. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said the response to an appeal by the United Nations to help Chernobyl victims launched three years ago had fallen so short that an original list of 60 projects had been shortened to the nine most urgent (three in each country). The projects include modernization of a hospital, creation of a network of centers to treat children, and decontamination of schools, kindergartens and hospitals in Belarus.
Poland. An 11-year health study in the Polish region most affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has found thyroid gland changes in every second young woman and in one in 10 children. The full report on the tests will be published later this year.
Doctors tested some 21,000 people randomly selected from urban and rural areas in Poland's southeastern corner near Bialystok, some 190 kilometers southeast of Warsaw. Half of the women had enlarged thyroid glands and 10 percent of the children had benign growths on the gland that have to be monitored for possible cancer, said Ida Kinalska, head of the doctors' team at the Medical Academy in Bialystok. Kinalska said the highest percentage of people with enlarged thyroid glands, up to 70 percent of the population, was observed near the towns of Kolno, Sejny and Suwalki.
Sweden. The Swedish radiation protection institute (Stralskyddsinstitutet (SSI), has given a warning that radioactive ash are being legally dumped at rubbish dumps. The ash, which has a caesium level of more than 5,000 bequerel, has been dumped in places where there is a risk that it will contaminate the ground water or surface water. The ash is the remains of so-called biological fuels that have been contaminated by radioactive particles from the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Although it is some years since the Chernobyl accident, the recommendations for handling the ash have been absent until now. This has lead to the potential spread of radioactive ash in places previously unaffected by the radioactivity from Chernobyl and according to the requirements, the Swedish rubbish dumps don't have to be prepared to handle radioactive ash until 2008.
According to the recently released recommendations, all ash in which the radioactivity is over a threshold value should be stored in special depots. SSI has said that the newer of the 600 Swedish rubbish dumps follow the regulations while it is at the older dumps where there is a risk that radioactivity may reach ground or surface water. The recommendations for handling the ash is intended for the older dumps, according to Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish daily newspaper. The recommendations reportedly include a ban on dumping radioactive ash in areas where reindeer moss grow as the radioactivity can contaminate reindeer meat through the moss and create problems for the Same, who depend on the meat as a source of income. If the meat is too radioactive, it cannot be sold.
France: The Court of Justice of the Republic said on April 25, it would soon examine a suit filed by a cancer patient against three former government ministers for failing to protect him from radioactive fallout following the Chernobyl nuclear explosion 14 years ago. The court (a special court formed in 1993 to handle legal action against government officials for actions taken in the exercise of their functions) confirmed it would examine whether Charles Pasqua, Michele Barzach and Alain Carrignon, then-ministers of the Interior, Health and the Environment respectively, are responsible for the thyroid cancer of Yohann Van Waeyenberghe.
The 31-year-old Van Waeyenberghe, father of two, was stricken with cancer in 1993. His thyroid gland was removed in 1994, and he has been an invalid ever since. Van Waeyenberghe, who lives in Reims in eastern France where heavy rains worsened the contamination, claims he contracted cancer because of what he claims was France's do-nothing policy. The French government displayed perfect calm, abstained from taking any measures, announced that the Chernobyl cloud did not pass over French territory, and minimized the results of the analysis of ionizing rays, the suit said. It wasn't until 17 days after the explosion that Industry Minister Alain Madelin banned the sale of spinach - and only in the Alsace region, in eastern France.
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