Reliable News from the Cancer Registry in Belarus

by Dr. Sebastian Pflugbeil, President of the Society for Radiation Protection, Berlin

Until now countries could, with a clear conscience, avoid having to do anything in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster about their energy policies by simply relying on the reports of institutions which ought to know: for example the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA or UNSCEAR, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Stereotypically, they report 31 deaths, several cases of thyroid cancer among children, regrettable but can be treated, and otherwise, at the most, rumours about this and that, all in all a very minor catastrophe.

The fact that the whole matter is discussed very differently by people in the Russian speaking world is no cause for serious concern because who understands their strange language anyway.

Seen against this background, the work of A.E. Okeanov and his colleagues*, which recently appeared in the periodical Swiss Medical Weekly, is remarkable in several ways. For many years, Okeanov was head of the cancer registry in Belarus, which has been systematically collecting data for the cancer statistics since 1973, a situation which most western states can only dream about. Today Okeanov works at the Clinical Institute of Radiation Medicine and Endocrinology Research in Minsk/Belarus. One can assume that he knows what he is talking about in his report.

In the controversial debate about the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, it is also significant that the Swiss Medical Weekly is not some tendentious brochure by Greenpeace, but a scientific periodical in which articles are peer reviewed before they are published. That may seem trivial. It is not however, if one knows that innumerable highly regarded articles have no chance of getting published in the relevant internationally respected journals because they contradict dominant doctrines or are a thorn in the side of the powerful in economics and politics. Such work then appears in journals that the wire-pullers in the scientific commissions and advisory committees believe they can ignore, by arguing that such articles are not "peer reviewed".

One last preliminary remark: Okeanov does not write about cancer mortality, but about cancerous affections, which is unusual. If you only look at cancer deaths, what you do not see is the woman, for example, who had to undergo mastectomy of both breasts due to cancer. Such cases are not part of the statistic. The scale of the disaster is reduced, the more medical progress is made; cancerous affections are not discussed and do not ruin the cleansed tables.

Okeanov proceeded in the following way: he takes the data for the incidence of total cancer morbidity in the population and establishes an average morbidity incidence for the ten years before the Chernobyl accident (1976-1985), and then compares them with the corresponding data for the period 1990-2000. (He omits the years between these two periods because cancerous affections typically take a few years, after a certain level of radiation, to break out.) Okeanov compares overall figures for Belarus, and in addition, for 6 areas and the capital city of Minsk as well. The results show that the cancer morbidity in all regions has risen, not just slightly, perhaps by accident, but "significantly", which in a statistical analysis really means something, i.e. that with 99% or 99,9% probability the result has nothing to do with coincidence.

The cancerous affections increased most in the Gomel area, about 52%, which was the area most affected by the Chernobyl fallout. This area is followed by those of Minsk (+?49%) Grodno (+?44%), Vitebsk (+?38%), Brest (+?33%), Mogiljow (+?32%) and the city of Minsk (+?18%). The rate for the whole of Belarus rose by 40%.

Furthermore, Okeanov compares the data of the highly contaminated Gomel region with the slightly contaminated Vitebsk region. He ascertains that the overall incidence of cancer morbidity and the rates for colon, urinary bladder and thyroid gland cancers are significantly higher in the Gomel region than in the Vitebsk region.

Okeanov also points out troubling changes in the breast cancer rate. In the highly contaminated Gomel region age specific distributions of breast cancer incidence have shown that the peak incidence rates have shifted to younger women, and today were reached at the age of 45-49 years, 15 years earlier than in the less contaminated Vitebsk region.

A special section of the article is dedicated to cancer morbidity among "liquidators", the people who were mobilised to clean up the most contaminated territory in Chernobyl. Okeanov compares the over 20-year-olds in the Vitebsk area with the liquidators and determines that the liquidators have a significant excess of incidence of all kinds of cancers in general and also specifically of cancers of colon and urinary bladder. The cancer incidence among liquidators increased on average by 5.5% annually, compared with 1.5% per year among a corresponding adult population of the Vitebsk region. The difference here was again a significant one.

So, let us put the cynical and belittling data of the IAEA, of UNSCEAR and that unfortunately long list of willing scientists where they belong – into the bin.

* A. E. Okeanov, E.Y. Sosnovskaya, O.P. Priatkina: A national cancer registry to assess trends after the Chernobyl accident, in: Swiss Medical Weekly 2004; 134:645-649, www.smw.ch