And then there is the issue of toxic waste, particularly heavy metals. We are just beginning to learn about those numbers, and there are not enough adequate data although I do have some numbers. In the green book - Ecological Disaster - there is a table comparing Russia with all of the European Economic Community and you will find that Russia in some cases has 10,000% or 12,000% or 60,000 percent of the total heavy metal pollution for all of the EEC.Health and the Environment in the Former Soviet Union Part I:An Inteview with Murray Feshbach
From the Environmental Review Newsletter Volume Two Number Nine, September 1995
SourceThe health of the people of the former Soviet Union and the condition of the environment are in decline. The life expectancy of Russians has fallen below that of other industrial countries and continues to decline. Large scale industrial and agricultural pollution of air, water and soils continues to occur in the states of the former Soviet Union, a perverse experiment on the effects of pollution on public health. Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, it is possible for the first time to obtain reliable information about the extent of pollution and the health conditions of the people of the former Soviet Union.
Dr. Murray Feshbach received the Ph.D. in economics in 1974 from The American University and has served as Branch Chief of the Foreign Demographic Analysis Division of the U.S. Bureau of the Census until 1981. He is now a research professor at Georgetown University department of demographics. He has been a fellow of the Kennan Institute and the Smithsonian Institution and in 1986-87 he served as Sovietologist-in-Residence in the Office of the Secretary General of NATO in Brussels, Belgium. Dr. Feshbach has served on numerous working groups and boards, both public and private, and has published over one hundred sholarly articles and book chapters on the demographics of the Soviet Union and Russia. In 1992, he published the book, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege with Alfred Friendly Jr. More recently he has written Ecological Disaster: Cleaning up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime, and with Gregory Guroff he has edited Environmental and Health Atlas of Russia. The Atlas is available from the Center for Post-Soviet Studies, Chevy Chase, MD. for $95.00. Telephone 301/652/8181; Fax 301/652/8451. We spoke with Professor Feshbach about his work on the atlas and about living conditions in Russia.
ER: Dr. Feshbach, what sort of information did you put in the Environmental and Health Atlas of Russia?
MF: The atlas has roughly 125 maps on environment, roughly 125 on health and roughly 50 on population, some economics and some law, all interrelated. There are also two forwards, one written by Dr. Gregory Guroff, and the other by Dr. Aleksey Yablokov who is the head of the Russian Federation government Interagency Commission on Environmental Security of the National Security Council. I wrote an introductory article, and then there is text and the maps. The text itself is descriptive of the maps, the situation, and the quality of data, and in a number of cases, a prognosis, be it of life expectancy, the spread of disease, or the pollution issue. We had limited space, given thirty-eight contributors, so we gave them roughly five pages each. The idea was to establish conditions, where levels and rates either of a given pollutant or a given illness were much different from other places. For example, average life expectancy is 57.3 years for males in Russia in 1994, but it could be much different someplace else, more than 68 or as low as 47, and that is an incredible, low level. The high level, 68 years, is very low compared to the rest of the developed world.
ER: Why did you undertake this project?
MF: The impetus for the atlas was a conversation at an international meeting in Moscow and then a visit to a lab on medical demography of the Soviet Ministry of Health. It was there that I met a group of people, including two young staff members of the Scientific Research Institute of Nature - who had created on a 286 computer with almost no memory - a very interesting geographic information system (GIS). [GIS displays information in map format. ed.] It appeared to me that there were possibilities of combining the work of the laboratory on medical demography and this GIS system where one could help set priorities as to where the medical and environmental problems in Russia were the greatest.
Then we then had to find good data and find good people who could work on the project. And starting with a core group of four Russians, two medical statisticians and two environmentalists, we then brought in thirty-four other Russians. And then we had to decide how many pages could be bound, and that number is about 500 pages without having to do a second volume. So that placed a limit on the number of maps or pages of text, even though one could have written a lot more. However, the coverage is very full, to include subjects from phytomass to parasitic diseases, both of which are almost never discussed, from soil stability to maternal mortality. This atlas has approximately one-tenth the number of maps it could have had. We did not include some of the maps because we thought some of the data was not yet good enough: for heavy metals and certain
other chemical pollutants. And while we have some data on these, they are not good enough on a state by state level.
In some cases you want small area data even below state level, say, if it is polluted around this plant and not in the whole state. You need to have very special kinds of research and analysis to do GIS at a sub-state level. All of the maps in the atlas are done on the equivalent of our state level - oblast by oblast - in Russia. That is eighty-nine administrative units, including Moscow and St. Petersburg which are administrative equivalents of an oblast.
Greg Guroff and I and his wife spent till two or three in the morning for three months solid, translating the whole 500 pages. After two Russian translators attempted a first translation, which we almost totally rejected, I learned more about soil stability and orography and airborne diseases and arborviruses and phytomass and parasitic diseases than I ever wanted to know. [Dr. Guroff, the co-editor, and project coordinator of the Environmental and Health Atlas, is at the Center for Post-Soviet Studies in Chevy Chase.]
ER: Who would find the Atlas useful?
MF: It would be extremely useful for policy makers and decision makers who have to allocate resources for priority needs, whether it be in infectious diseases on a regional basis, or excess male mortality, or on polluted surface water or on radioactive toxic waste dumps, their capacity and levels of fullness, to contamination of soils. All of these topics are discussed.
ER: How does the information compare to western science standards?
MF: It is certainly getting up to a comparable level. In some cases I think actually they are ahead of some western methods; in some cases they are thirty years behind. The Russians are now building up to a better quality of science overall because of the relaxation of prior political controls.
ER: How much does failure of the health care system contribute to life expectancy compared to environmental problems?
MF: More in some areas, less in other areas. The general evaluation by the people whose work I trust more than others, say that from twenty to thirty percent of the poor health condition of the population is due to ecology. Now what share directly contributes to that portion of cancer; for example, which lowers life expectancy because cancer is increasing, I do not know, but in some areas I can tell you the environmental effect is devastating. In Krasnodar Kray, it was reported that eighteen year-olds were not drafted for about ten years because virtually all of them had cancer, mostly of the digestive system, because of excess use of pesticides and herbicides in the rice growing regions of this area. In Nikel', a town near the border with Norway where they produce and process nonferrous metals, the life expectancy of workers at this plant is thirty-four years. In Nikel' the annual per capita emissions of gases, liquids, metals, is thirty-five tons. In another area it is eighty-six tons per capita, that is the worst. That is the mother company that Nikel belongs to but is in a different location. There are other areas in which life expectancy, certainly of infants, has been affected by, for instance, the dessication of the Aral Sea: the salt and dust storms which contain minerals and fertilizers and other things not too healthy for the mother or for the child. I cannot specifically tell you that one percent of all infants die because of environmental conditions, but in individual areas I suspect that it is an extremely large percentage although I cannot give you that figure.
Simultaneously there are area by area reasons for the different environmental causes, so in some cases it may be desertification - the only desert in all of Europe is being formed in southern Russia - or it may be oil and gas pipeline accidents. Usinsk, which got so much publicity, is one of the smaller of the major accidents. By that I mean there are almost two major oil and gas accidents every day in Russia: approximately 700 major oil and gas spills per year, where major is defined as 10,000 or more gallons spilled. And there are about 25,000 minor spills a year in Russia.
ER: That is due to derelict infrastructure?
MF: That's right. It is the pipes themselves, it is the well heads, it is the lack of repair and maintenance.
ER: What are the main problems with the health care system in Russia?
MF: Fifty percent of all hospitals in Russia do not have hot water; twenty percent do not have any water at all and about twenty-five percent do not have any sewage connection. In addition, you have health delivery by physicians who were trained prior to the revision of the curriculum in 1987; they have no college: they did not have any of that four years of basic, fundamental college education but went directly into medical school. And they are not equipped with proper modern technology; for example, fetal monitoring devices or paper for electrocardiograms.
Many Russian physicians are providing very poor diagnoses. They dislike the word "rak" - the Russian word for cancer - and they try to avoid it, and diagnostic errors can lead to non-appropriate treatment. I think most of the figures on cancer are understated, especially breast cancer, partly because Muslim women do not go to male doctors and that sort of thing.
ER: Then there was the government directive after Chernobyl not to attribute deaths to radiation from the accident.
MF: That is another issue: not showing chronic radiation sickness.
ER: Doctors were not allowed to diagnose radiation poisoning?
MF: That is correct and I even have the secret instructions on that. Now that is another issue. There is a big disagreement between myself and a certain health physicist of this country who believes that the health impact of Chernobyl was much less serious. The 1989 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency based in Vienna - conducted at the formal invitation of the Soviet government - said everything is radiophobia. I think that report is totally wrong because it was done only two years after the event. They did not know the Soviet system at the time, they did not even know there was a Third Administration which had secret health data from nuclear, chemical and biological warfare accidents and they got no documents from that. The report only looked at the 100,000 people still resident in the area around Chernobyl, not the 5,000 Latvian troops who went back to die, not the 12,000 Uzbek troops who went back to die. And, of course, it was not even seven to ten years after the event, which is the peak period for thyroid cancer and leukemia to appear, as we learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
ER: You said life expectancy for Russian men is down to fifty-seven and for women it is seventy-one. Why is there such a big difference?
MF: That is a fourteen year difference. In part that is for reasons such as suicides, murders - though suicide is high among females also, especially the elderly women - accidents, poisonings. But in addition, there are the deaths at younger ages as you would see by the average of fifty-seven.
ER: Could the reason for increased mortality be partly because now you are getting true numbers from the government?
MF: It is partly because things are getting worse; it is also partly because of the infant mortality figures being more reliable than they were, and infant mortality has a very high rate. Let me be very blunt, average male life expectancy is fifty-eight years; that is about nine years less than black males in this country, and that is really terrible, both are terrible. And I believe it is going to go down to fifty-five by the end of the century for a variety of reasons including smoking. Not everybody smokes but such a high percentage do that you can almost wash it away as a differential cause of illness. Then you have issues of stress under the current transition - which hopefully will go away eventually - and that includes living conditions, housing, water pipelines, radioactivity, chemicals.
ER: What are the highest priorities of needs for the Russian people?
MF: When we are talking about environment and its impact on health, I find it very difficult to choose between radioactivity and chemicals, though now I think the chemicals may be getting worse. By chemicals I am defining that to include dioxins, benzo(a)pyrene, normal kinds of chemical pollution from accidents, as well as chemical weapons which are still to be dismantled. And we are not sure what the real number for chemical weapons is, whether it is 40 thousand tons, or 150-200 thousand, or double that.
And then there is the issue of toxic waste, particularly heavy metals. We are just beginning to learn about those numbers, and there are not enough adequate data although I do have some numbers. In the green book - Ecological Disaster - there is a table comparing Russia with all of the European Economic Community and you will find that Russia in some cases has 10,000% or 12,000% or 60,000 percent of the total heavy metal pollution for all of the EEC.
ER: That is basically industrial pollutants?
MF: That is basically industrial pollution and agricultural pollution. Chemical pollution is a very big issue. Chemicals also includes the liquid rocket fuel Heptyl, which is super-toxic, carcinogenic, nerve paralyzing, and volatile. It is not fun stuff. There are 100 to 150 thousand tons of it around Russia. And as far as I know, there is no known way of getting rid of it that is not prohibitively expensive other than burning it off by stationary rockets and you just get out of the neighborhood because otherwise you will be dead. In the north of Russia, the whole Plesetsk cosmodrome fallout area is totally bereft of plants and animals. It is a major area of 17.4 million acres in Arkhangel'sk oblast.
With radioactivity, I think we are beginning to see the second and third generation of pass-throughs in chromosomal aberrations and genetic effects particularly in areas affected by open-air atomic weapons testing prior to 1963. Not to mention 636 radioactive toxic waste sites found in 1991-1992 in the city of Moscow, 1,500 in the city of Leningrad, 800 in the city of Omsk, 700 here and 500 there. They clean up most of them and then they find fifty to eighty new sites every year. Can you imagine finding two or three radioactive waste sites being found in Seattle and what kind of a reaction there would be? It is partly because radioactive toxic waste dumps or repositories are almost totally full. So what do you do with the stuff? It costs money to haul it away, so why bother? Just put it on the outside of the hospital that uses sources of ionizing radiation.
There are also issues of water quality. The water quality in Russia is very bad. It is very hard for me to separate in terms of highest priorities, water and chemicals and radioactivity, combined and separately.
ER: In your book you said three-quarters of the surface water in the country is polluted.
MF: That is still the case, and fifty percent of the water is drinkable. But more than that, Russians draw seventy percent of their water for consumption from surface water, which is just not done by other countries. And even underground aquifers are getting polluted. Heavy metals and other chemicals and wastes get into the water. About two months ago a plant dumped sixteen tons of mercury in the northern Dvina river near Arkhangel city. They were just cleaning out their tanks. And that sort of thing happens all over the place.
And there is the issue of air pollution. My favorite quote is from Dr. A. I. Potopov, a former minister of health of Russia, "To live longer, breathe less." That is not very helpful but it says something: the air is not just acrid as in Los Angeles and a few other places that were terrible and have been cleaned up to some degree. I think it is still bad here in the U.S. but the Russians wish they had our problems.
ER: In Los Angeles and St. Louis they do not have unregulated industrial smokestacks.
MF: That's right. And the point is, you can have a smokestack but you are supposed to maintain it and they do not in Russia. They had 3 million one hundred thousand stationary sources of pollution for the air in 1990; one-half had a filter on them, and one-third of those worked.
ER: How could the health and environment get so bad in the Soviet Union and now Russia?
MF: Because the drive was to obtain military production and heavy industrial products regardless of the cost, whether it be social, economic or environmental. To repeat, they wanted that production regardless of cost. It was a different social contract, a different value judgement.
Copyright 1995 Environmental Review
Environmental Review (ISSN 1080-644X) published monthly at:
6920 Roosevelt Way NE STE 307Seattle, WA. 98115
1/800/526-2501 email -
dtaylor@igc.apc.orgSubscription rates $25.50 for one year, $45.00 for two years, $15.00 for one year for students, teachers and seniors.
For information or to subscribe send email to
dtaylor@igc.apc.org