Article 16 of 872

Subject:      Re: Nuclear Roulette/Son of Star Wars/Chernobyl=DEATH
From:         "Dr. Richard X.  Frager" <naretres@aracnet.com>
Date:         1997/01/18
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Aftermath of the Apocalypse - In 1995 the United Nations reported that in 
contaminated areas of Ukraine, illnesses of all kinds are up 38 percent above normal 
levels.  In Gomel, over the Belarus border about 150 kilometers northeast of 
Chernobyl, government statistics show thyroid cancer rates among children to be fully 
200 times higher than before the (nuclear power plant) accident.  Massive increases 
are also reported throughout Belarus and Ukraine as a whole.  Writing in 'New 
Scientist', Dilwyn Williams, professor of histopathology at England's Cambridge 
University and president of the European Thyroid Association, predicts that thyroid 
cancer will ultimately strike more than 40 percent of the downwind children who were 
less than a year old when exposed.  Williams says the irradiated babies are thirty 
times as likely to contract cancer as those who were 10 years old at the time of the 
accident. "I have done some sums" on future cancer deaths, he says, and "the answers 
terrify me."

Adds Dr. John Gofman, who founded and directed a biomedical lab for the U.S. Atomic 
Energy Commission (predecessor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), "There is no 
way the children of the area could not have gotten a massive dose.  The Soviets 
admitted they could not tell people living near the plant to stop drinking the milk 
in the first few days of the accident, when the radioactive iodine was concentrating 
in the grass being eaten by the cows there.  The younger the children were, the 
heavier the doses.  It's crazy to think you would not have an epidemic."

Ukrainian officials now predict at least 200,000 local deaths, and are reporting 
increases in bone tumors as well as cancers of the kidney, bladder, lung and breast.  
Overall death rates, they say, are soaring.  In Belarus, says a World Health 
Organization group, the killing power of the fallout is proving "much greater than 
previously thought."

Guesses at the worldwide death toll vary widely.  Morris Rosen of the United Nations' 
International Atomic Energy Agency, which both promotes and monitors worldwide 
reactors, has put the long-term death count at 20,000.  Dr. Robert Gale, the Los 
Angeles physician who made global headlines by offering his services in the Chernobyl 
area at the peak of the disaster, has predicted 30,000 cancer cases over the next 
fifty years half of them OUTSIDE THE SOVIET UNION.  "A nuclear accident anywhere is a 
nuclear accident everywhere," he says.  Within months of the accident, Gofman 
estimated that its fallout would ultimately cause a million cancers worldwide, half 
of them fatal.

Jay Gould and Dr. Ernest Sternglass have attributed some 40,000 premature deaths in 
the United States to the Chernobyl cloud that passed over the country in 1986.  
Author of "The Enemy Within", a 1995 study linking heightened cancer rates to 
residence near U.S. reactors, Gould is a New-York based statistician who served as a 
member of the Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board under Jimmy 
Carter.  Professor emeritus of radiology at the University of Pittsburgh, Sternglass 
says the United States suffered "a four-month-long radiation epidemic" in the summer 
of 1986 , with a 13 percent rise in infant mortality rates nationwide in June alone.

Jens Scheer, professor nuclear physics at Germany's University of Bremen, concurs 
that there is "no question" that the summer epidemic was linked to Chernobyl fallout.  
Dr. Andreas Nidecker of the University of Basel in Switzerland predicts that 
"eventually, when all the facts are in, it will be shown that similar effects 
occurred in Europe."  Meanwhile, Joseph Mangano of the New York-based Radiation and 
Public Health Project, writing in the March issue of the European Journal of Cancer 
Prevention, has linked Chernobyl to an accelerated rate of thyroid cancers among 
children in Connecticut, Iowa and Utah, all of which keep detailed health statistics.  
"The thyroid is very sensitive to radioactive iodine, a major part of the Chernobyl 
cloud, which brushed all three of these states," he says.  "The rise there 
corresponds exactly with the 1990-95 rise in Belarus and Ukraine."  

Mangano has also found significant hypothyroidism, a rare radiation-related birth 
ailment, among babies born in the Pacific Northwest, where spring rainstorms brought 
down the fallout in 1986.  "There are a lot more diseases that haven't been studied," 
Mangano says.  The increases in thyroid cancer and hypothyroidism "nowhere near cover 
all Chernobyl's damage."

Almost eleven years after, the scope of Chernobyl's tragic fallout stretches ever 
deeper into the unfathomable.  Following the April 26, 1986 explosion, the reactor 
spewed out at least eight tons of radioactive poison, about 200 times more 
radioactivity than was released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  By some estimates, its 
fallout surpassed the total released by all nuclear weapons tests.  Much of it 
blasted into the jet stream through fuel tubes described by one Brookhaven National 
Laboratory scientist as "1,600 howitzers pointed at the sky."  The radioactive shroud 
blanketed Ukraine and Belarus and Russia; blew deep into Scandinavia, Western Europe 
and Great Britain, and tripped radiation monitors from New England to Northern 
California.  

In the countryside around the reactor, as in central Pennsylvania after the 1979 
partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, local farmers and veterinarians reported a 
wave of animal deformities, sterility and deaths.  


From "In the Dead Zone: Aftermath of the Apocalypse" from 
The Nation Magazine; April 29, 1996.
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