VIENNA, Austria (Reuter) - The Chernobyl nuclear accident caused a sharp rise in thyroid cancers and may be linked to leukemia among workers cleaning up the radioactive fallout, experts said Tuesday.
Ten years after the fire and blast at the Ukrainian reactor spewed radiation over most of Europe, 700 delegates, politicians and nuclear experts met to discuss the long-term impacts of the world's worst nuclear accident.
``The Chernobyl incident resulted in a significant increase in thyroid cancers,'' said Anatoly Tsyb, an expert at Russia's Medical Radiological Research Center.
He said a possible link between the fallout and a spate of leukemia among clean-up workers was particularly worrying. Earlier studies were unable to find any ties between the contamination and the illness.
Leaders from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine attending the conference painted a grim picture of the shattered lives and environmental chaos in their countries caused by radiological aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion of April 26, 1986.
The speakers from the three ex-Soviet republics most affected by the accident stressed above all that cash and technical aid were urgently needed to ease the suffering of thousands of people living in contaminated areas.
Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said his country was forced to spend 25 percent of its annual budget to deal with the effects of what he called a ``radioactive tornado never seen before.''
About 70 percent of the fallout was deposited on Belarus.
The estimated total radioactivity from the blast was 200 times more than from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, the World Health Organization said.
The organization is co-sponsoring the conference with the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Commission.
The four-day conference opened with a minute's silence for past, present and future victims of the Chernobyl disaster.
``The future health effects will be mostly related to children and pyschological issues will remain in the forefront,'' said Professor Fred Mettler who led an international health assessment team to Chernobyl in 1990.
According to the World Health Organization, an increase in thyroid cancer among children of about 100 times the pre-accident levels was recorded in the Gomel area of Belarus.
Gomel lay in the direct path of the initial toxic cloud unleashed when the explosions at Chernobyl's Unit Four hurled huge amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Only on May 5 -- 11 days after the accident -- did the reactor begin to cool down and the release of radioactivity start to decrease.
In 1990, the parliament of Belarus declared the entire republic an ecological disaster zone.
Experts at the meeting said about 54,000 square miles -- about the size of Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland combined -- was contaminated.
Russian Civil Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told delegates the accident was the greatest man-made disaster this century.
``It is our duty to do everything to eliminate or mitigate the consequences of this accident,'' Shoigu said. ``This tragic experience must be a warning to mankind so that Chernobyl will never happen again.''