Health Effects
• Shortly after the explosion, thousands of children and adults in Ukraine and Belarus were stricken with acute radiation sickness. Symptoms included vomiting, hair loss, severe rashes; this contradicts the original official public estimates of 100 people affected.
• In 1994 experts from the University of Hiroshima analysed data on newborns and 30,000 stillborn foetuses in Belarus; researchers concluded that birth defects have nearly doubled since 1986.
• More than 10,000 Ukrainian children have travelled to Cuba for treatment of leukaemia and other illnesses.
• Overall, oncological illnesses (cancers) among children in Ukraine have tripled since 1986.
• In 2001, a joint Israeli-Ukrainian study published in the Royal Society of Medicine in London found that the children of Chornobyl liquidators born after the 1986 disaster have a rate of chromosome damage seven times higher than their siblings born prior to the nuclear accident.
• Fifty percent of all Ukrainian men between the ages of 13 and 29 have fertility problems - the highest rate of infertility in the world.
• According to radiation health experts most cancers that result from radiation exposure do not develop until 10-20 years after exposure. Therefore no accurate assessment of Chernobyl’s overall impact can be made until this period has elapsed.
• A 2001 study by American and Ukrainian scientists identified a significantly higher rate of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia among children in northern Ukraine, as compared to the relatively uncontaminated Eastern Ukraine. Blood tests of the children showed that they had been exposed to radiation in utero. This study was re-confirmed after several international peer reviews.
• Since 2005, local paediatric oncologists in the northern Ukrainian region of Rivne, have been reporting a noticeable increase in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia among young children. All these children are from the most isolated contaminated villages along the Belarusian border.
• In Belarus there has been a 2,400% increase in the rates of thyroid cancer. Before Chernobyl, on average, there was less than one case of thyroid cancer per year.
• In the Gomel region of Belarus, the region closest to Chernobyl, there was a 100-fold increase in thyroid cancer.
• Throughout Belarus, the incidence of thyroid cancer in 1990 was already 30 times higher than in the years before the accident
• In the Gomel region of Belarus, the incidence of leukaemia increased 50% in children and adults.
• UNICEF reports that between 1990 and 1994, nervous system disorders increased by 43%; cardiovascular diseases by 43%; bone and muscle disorders by 62%; and diabetes by 28%. UNICEF cautioned that it is difficult to prove whether these increases were caused by radiation or another unknown factor.
• A Swiss study shows a 40% increase in all kinds of cancers in Belarus between 1990 and 2000.
• Tumour specialists fear that a variety of new cancers will only emerge 20 - 30 years after the disaster.
• Five years after the disaster, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health reported three times the normal rate of deformities and developmental abnormalities in newborn children, as well as an increased number of miscarriages, premature births, and stillbirths.
• Heart disease in Belarus has quadrupled since the accident, caused by the accumulation of radioactive caesium in the cardiac muscle. Doctors report a high incidence of multiple defects of the heart - a condition coined “Chernobyl Heart.”
