Chernobyl Disaster, Ten Years Later
MINSK (Reuter) - Former Soviet republics affected by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster face a peak in cancers caused by radioactivity in about nine years' time, Belarus's Chernobyl minister said Monday.
Ivan Kenik, speaking outside a conference held in the run-up to the disaster's 10th anniversary, said Belarus had little experience with radiation-linked illness, notably thyroid cancer in children, and needed Western help to cope.
``The peak of the consequences linked to the Chernobyl disaster will be reached in about the year 2005 because of a sharp increase in cancers,'' Kenik said after addressing the opening of the week-long conference.
``In contaminated regions, incidence of thyroid and breast cancer and leukemia is two to three times higher than in other regions. Belarus has never had to cope with this and needs concrete medical help.''
He said 2,000 families would be resettled this year from districts with unacceptably high radiation -- the last to be moved since the April 26, 1986 disaster.
Belarus, a country of 10 million sandwiched between Russia, Ukraine and Poland, suffered the most from the explosion and fire at Chernobyl, just over the border in Ukraine.
Seventy percent of all radiation spewed across most of Europe fell on its territory.
President Alexander Lukashenko told the conference that one quarter of Belarus's territory had been contaminated by the disaster. Cleanup operations accounted, directly or indirectly, for 25 percent of all spending in the national budget.
``Anyone who has not dealt directly with the tragedy of radioactivity might think this is no longer a timely issue,'' he said in comments shown on national television.
``For Belarus, Ukraine and Russia this tragedy had a clear beginning but no end is in sight. For many generations to come, we will have to take account of the consequences in working out our social and economic programs.''
Firm statistics on the number of people affected by the disaster are difficult to pin down, but authorities in Ukraine say it caused several thousand deaths in their country alone.
Hundreds of thousands have been resettled in all three former Soviet republics and similar numbers have had to undergo long-term medical treatment.
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma agreed under pressure last year to close Chernobyl's two working reactors by the end of the century. But officials have said they cannot meet deadlines unless they start getting part of the Western aid package of $2.3 billion in aid and credits.