Belarus – The Nuclear Contamination Claims Its Victims

by Dr. Elsbeth Malthes, Rohring

Suffering and helplessness –this is how one could describe the fate of thousands of people in Belarus, in western Russia and in the Ukraine. The economic and social problems are scandalous: Dictatorial governments are tightening their noose, bygone times are dawning again. The often miserable health condition of many adds to the overall suffering. It is not just the “usual” epidemics like hepatitis A and tuberculosis which have taken a hold here. There is also Chernobyl, the fatal explosion which occurred near the Ukrainian city of Pripjat in 1986. The medical consequences of the radioactive contamination are grave. For instance, epidemiologically the weakened immune system of the population poses a huge medical challenge.

Babushka is crying. “Why?” she asks, “Why?” Aljoscha, her four-year-old grandson was taken to hospital in Minsk for a biopsy on suspicion of having cancer of the gallbladder. The child looked very weak and pale and has suffered for years from a variety of allergies, one of which means he can not eat dairy products. Babushka is crying. Parents and grandparents live in constant fear that their children might have been affected with radioactive contamination. Babushka has already lost her husband to cancer. He was a train driver of the trains which took the big deliveries of uranium from the USSR to Brest. In Brest, uranium was then transferred for transport to other communist countries. This transfer was carried out by very young soldiers, between the ages of 18 and 22. They were told they should shower after work. However, they were not “disciplined” and many did not shower. 20 million cubic metres of earth would have had to be cleared in order to stop the radioactive contamination. The intention was to take the uranium away and to bury it in a biosphere reserve south of Brest. Protests from residents prevented this, so the uranium continues to lie in Brest and contaminate the place. Contamination of the groundwater at the deepest levels has been predicted.

Propaganda

The propaganda of the government on Chernobyl has nothing to do with reality. Reality is very cruel, the population is ailing. They eat contaminated food and pass on the damage to their children. Even small doses of radioactive contamination have damaging effects on health as the Russian professor Elena Burlakova or the American specialist John D. Gofmann have proved. Dr. Anatoly Volkov of the Medical Centre for Diagnostics in Pinsk also points this out. Volkov and his team examined more than 900,000 people after the explosion at Chernobyl until 1999. Already in 1999, at a meeting of the parliamentary commission for problems arising from Chernobyl, Volkov said the worst consequences of the Chernobyl accident were yet to come. The extent of the tragedy had not been realised. Secrets were made about it. That made the situation worse. The radioactive caesium had not dispersed by itself, as some wished to believe. Instead, it accumulated in the ground and in the water supply. Caesium in the water was even more dangerous. Volkov took the opportunity at the time to collect samples of the sludge from the river Dnepr. The percentage of radioactive caesium which he found gave him the right to assume that the worst was yet to come. The effects of smaller contamination doses on health have not been adequately researched.

Chernobyl

Whether he wants to or not, a visitor to Belarus cannot ignore the Chernobyl catastrophe. The government has propagated people’s return to contaminated regions in the past few years, except to the thirty-kilometre-zone, called “The Zone” for short. Already in 1999, the government ceased handing out allowances for the resettled people, for trains, the tram, etc. according to the motto that people can live anywhere in Belarus again and can eat everything. Lukaschenko is begging to get a nuclear power station built near Minsk. The second variation of the nuclear power station lies in western Russia. Not a very comforting idea either. People commonly speak of the Atomic Mafia …

Why did they wait three days before evacuating people out of the area near the reactor explosion in Chernobyl? A three-day wait –this was also the time span before evacuation of the Bikini-Atoll or of the Semipalatinsk area in Kazakhstan took place. In both these areas carefully planned radioactive tests were carried out. And the evacuation plans? Were the three days planned or not? Evacuation could have taken place immediately after the Chernobyl explosion. The Soviets have experience in evacuation. 18 years after this huge catastrophe the questions must be asked once again, must be spelled out more clearly. What was it all about? What was and is the aim?

Foresters, forestry workers, hunters and biologists had to shoot the larger mammals after the disaster. Thousands of elks, deer, rabbits, cattle and wild boar were shot and their carcasses burnt. The danger that the animals would be hunted outside the closed-off areas was too great. When biologists examine black or wood grouse today, they find high concentrations of radioactive particles such as caesium, strontium, etc. in the liver and kidneys, in the spleen and almost all internal organs. It depends on what these birds eat. The elks which eat lichens are particularly badly affected. Fungi and wild berries are not edible.

Olmany

The small village of Olmany lies 220km away from Chernobyl, in the south of Belarus on the border with Ukraine. Olmany is very highly contaminated with caesium. The reason for this is because after the Chernobyl accident, rainfall in the area meant radioactive fall-out was especially bad. Marshland has the effect of storing caesium whereas in sandy ground it seeps downwards. Olmany lies on the edge of a very large marsh area. This drained marshland is used for agriculture.

Since 1989 the leukaemia rate has been rising among children in the small village. Most of the farmers and forest workers do not keep dairy cattle, although a few do. The milk is too strongly contaminated with caesium, especially when the cows graze in the forest, which often happens. Vladimir was a forester and responsible for the marsh area. He often spent the whole day in the woods. When the accident took place, he was also put on standby (along with the other foresters and civil servants) for the evacuation of thousands of people out of the Chernobyl area. This evacuation, however, did not take place until three days later. Vladimir, at the time, was both fit and healthy. Now he has had to take early retirement as a result of exposure to contamination. He told us about Project Ethos, which was carried out by the European Commission in the Stolin/Olmany area. They wanted to teach the villagers new techniques for decontaminating food and new methods of farming.

Vladimir is not so positive in his assessment of the situation. The simplest devices to reduce contamination would be, for instance, providing gas heating and running water for every house. Wood should not be used as fuel for heating or cooking and people should be able to shower every evening. In particular, the forest and field workers, the people who work on the kolkhoz (collective farm), are the ones who inhale the dust. But even these necessary safety measures were not provided.

Olmany could also have been affected by the experiments that were carried out with enriched uranium in the marsh areas in the 1960s. In the 1950s, all the villages in the area were evacuated. A polygon was set up, a military testing area for missiles and military exercises of all sorts. Anatoly Volkov, the doctor from Pinsk (Pinsk lies about 90 km away from the polygon) does not rule out the suspicion that missile and ammunition tests with other nuclear material may have also taken place.

The food chain

What makes people sick eighteen years after Chernobyl? One essential reason is the intake of caesium and strontium via food. In children, caesium and strontium deposits remain in the body roughly forty days, in pregnant women 40 days too, and in other adults, up to 80 days. Because of the marshy quality of the ground, caesium and strontium do not disappear deep into the ground but land up in animal feed and then in the daily food supply. Strontium is much more toxic than caesium. In comparison, there are lower quantities of strontium in Belarus than caesium.

Strontium is stored in the liver, kidneys and bones, especially in bone-marrow. It is the cause of bone cancer. The presence of strontium cannot be proven, except in very large quantities, such as found in victims of the accidents at Mayak and Cheljabinsk in the Urals.

The forest floor is made up of humus. As a result, radio-nuclides accumulate in the forest floor, in the food of deer, elk, and wild boar, and in the fungi and from there they are introduced to the food chain, especially in areas where farmland is poor and hunting and fungi are necessary to people’s survival.

The food chain is a decisive influence on the levels of caesium and strontium in humans. People’s daily bread is the root cause of their suffering.

Criticism of the CORE Programme

The CORE programme has been in existence in four districts south of Belarus since the end of 2003: Stolin, Tchetchersk, Bragin and Slavgorod.

Michel Fernex, who used to work for the World Health Organisation, sharply criticises the main direction of the CORE programme of the European Union which was built up on the Ethos project. In the CORE Programme, an importance is put on “living with the level of radioactivity”, on “Integrational” experience with a “radioactive grade”. Medical aid and the registration of radioactive levels in the people and the food supply has been strongly pushed into the background. Excellent Belarusian scientists like Vassili Nesterenko have been got rid of. The delivery of apple pectin to children has been refused, although its ability to reduce the affects of caesium in children has been proven.

People in Belarus say that they were given help for many years. For some time this has been hindered by the politics and directives of Lukaschenko: Chernobyl is over, and people can live anywhere and eat everything now. The people should return and live a normal life. Due to this playing down of the real problems, western donors decided to stop providing help.

More than 100,000 people have left the area of Gomel and Mogilev, which were strongly contaminated by rainfall from radioactive clouds. The town of Gomel is emptying. When children are selected for the urgently necessary recuperative holidays in the west, they are often children of the elite, so the story goes.

In the early years, a great deal of help in the form of financial aid was provided by the west. Independent NGOs have also always played and still play a valuable role in providing help in Belarus. The Chernobyl initiative of the Propstei in Schöppenstedt/North Germany is one such initiative which is very actively, together with others like the “Otto Hug Radiation Institute” in Munich, run by Professor Lengfelder, or the Belrad Association, an independent radiation protection institute in Minsk, directed by W. B. Nesterenko. The NGO “Enfants de Tschernobyl Belarus” supports Belrad with the help of the Swiss PSR/IPPNW. One of the things PSR/IPPNW advocates is doing away with the suppressive agreement between the WHO and the IAEA which hinders the WHO from publishing details of the damage to health caused by the Chernobyl accident and other damaging effects caused by nuclear tests or accidents.

Artificial radioactivity – a medical challenge

The statistics of the illness rates in Belarus pose a challenge to medical science. There needs to be an exhaustive discussion on the causes of these illnesses in the respective medical journals. Geologists and hydrologists need to research the obvious contamination of the ground water. The radioactive load in foodstuffs needs to be recorded in minute detail by food scientists. Unavoidably, one then finds oneself confronted with questions connected with the eastern expansion of the European Union: Food imports from which countries? Which poisonous substances are they being tested for? How do we deal with the large increase in the number of people with a weakened immune system? Are there correlations to the sudden increase in tuberculosis cases?

An open scientific discussion would be able to provide some answers. Any restricted scientific discussion would prolong the suffering. The medical world should demand this discussion and derive effective help from the results.