Vitali Prokopenko is cradling his 10-year-old daughter Sasha in his arms as he opens the door of his flat. He ushers guests into the small living area so he can sit more comfortably with Sasha in an armchair. As he talks, his muscular hands are constantly fretting, smoothing the trousers on her withered legs, shifting her enlarged head to ease the pressure.
Early in the morning of Saturday April 26 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl jettisoned 100 times as much radiation into the atmosphere as the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Most fell on the now independent republics of Belarus and Ukraine, and in western Russia.
In 1996, Sasha was born prematurely at the main hospital in Gomel, Belarus’s second city. She weighed only 1,6kg, but developed well in the first weeks. Then, at seven months, Vitali and his wife, Tanya, noticed her head ”becoming bigger and bigger”. The hospital reassured them that children’s bodies grew at different rates. Soon afterwards, Sasha developed an infection and was sent to hospital in the capital, Minsk, where doctors found she had hydrocephalus, a condition in which cerebrospinal fluid builds up, putting pressure on the brain and swelling the unfixed skulls of small children.
Today Sasha’s head weighs 7,92kg, in distorted contrast to her undeveloped, almost immobile body. The weight gives her pressure sores and chafing. Vitali does most of the caring, while Tanya, who grew up in the contamination zone, works as an accountant. Sasha can hear well but cannot respond easily, says Vitali, but he understands that when she fidgets her legs she’s hungry, wants a nappy changed or is bored. ”I get support from Sasha,” says Vitali. ”I don’t know how I’d live without her.”
A girl of 10 with an enlarged head and small body who loves peach and passion-fruit yoghurt could never be a statistic. Nor is Sasha — nor any of the other children and families supported by Gomel’s hospice — a certain victim of Chernobyl, just over the border in Ukraine.
Lethal legacy
Only two people were killed in the explosion, but the lethal legacy of the accident could scarcely be grasped at the time. Within a few months, 31 emergency workers — the ”liquidators” — had died. Two decades later, Chernobyl is blamed for thousands of deaths and has blighted the health, economic prosperity and social fabric of millions of people, especially in Belarus.
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and seven other United Nations bodies estimated 4 000 people would die as a result of Chernobyl. The report was greeted by relief and disbelief. Many studies from the World Health Organisation, independent scientists and campaign groups had predicted a far more catastrophic impact.
In response, a group of disbelievers, led by the European Green party, commissioned its own study, The Other Chernobyl Report, which estimated a toll of between 30 000 and 60 000 premature deaths. Last week, the international Greenpeace campaign group released another study by 50 scientists claiming 200 000 lives would be lost, nearly half from cancers.
In southern Belarus, the evidence of experts and families supports the scientists who claim Chernobyl’s impact is much worse than the IAEA forecast. A senior doctor at Gomel children’s hospital claims that as few as one in four babies born in the region is healthy. The reasons expert opinions differ so widely range from data-collection problems to corruption and a tangled web of cause and effect in a society dealing with the explosion’s legacy — the mass evacuations and the devastation.
Radiation would be found almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere, from the United States to Japan, and on hill farms in Wales, some of which are still too contaminated to sell their produce. The greatest part of the pollution fell on the three countries nearest the reactor: more than 150 000 square kilometres — an area the size of England, Wales and Northern Ireland; in Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia were contaminated; between five million and nine million people were affected.
Belarus
Belarus suffered most: according to the World Bank, 70% of the radioactive fallout landed there, affecting more than 3 600 towns and villages, 2,5-million people and a quarter of farmland and forests. A quarter of Belarus still has some contamination. Most of the problem was and is in the Gomel region.
In early spring, the vast birch and pine forests in the 30km ”exclusion” zone around Chernobyl are still carpeted with thick snow. But employees who ignore bans on entering or hunting here report the area is thick with wild mushrooms and berries, animals such as wild boar, elk, wild goats, wolves, hares and deer are thriving, and fish in the rivers are bigger than ever. Scientists from the US and Ukraine found nature has blossomed in the absence of almost any humans.
”In a way it [the radiation] is good for the wildlife … the Ukrainian government has to make a decision whether to make it a preserved area,” says one of the official Chernobyl guides, Sergei. But this quiet, beguiling beauty belies the evil of the silent, invisible, deadly radiation that is everywhere, immediately around Chernobyl and far beyond in Belarus.
Travelling around Belarus, it is striking how many people know more than one, sometimes several, friends and relatives who have health problems: school friends with cancer, a grandson or sister with thyroid problems.
Luba Tagai, a nurse sponsored by the Irish charity Chernobyl Children’s Project International at the Vesnovo children’s asylum, a few hours’ drive south of Minsk, was eight and living 50km from Chernobyl in 1986. She is one of 4 000 children of the town recorded as having thyroid cancer. Her sister has had the cancer and she regularly gets news of friends falling ill. ”There are lots of young people with different cancers, lung cancer, thyroid glands removed, leukaemia. When I was leaving the region there was a new cemetery; now it’s full.”
Luba’s story is supported by health and community workers. Vesnovo’s director, Vecheslav Klimovich, says that, despite a declining birth rate in Belarus, as many children as ever need beds at the ”orphanage”, suffering from both physical and mental problems. At the day-care centre in Yelsk, Andrei Luzan has seen the same trend. At Gomel children’s hospital, the story is depressingly familiar.
”Before 1985, the common number of kids being born in Gomel region was 28 000 a year and the hospital had 350 beds,” says Olga Pushchenka, the hospital’s deputy chief doctor. ”Now the number of kids being born is about 14 000 and the number of beds is the same and we don’t have spare beds. The kids suffer more often, and diseases are more severe.”
The most common illnesses are respiratory and rheumatic diseases, heart and blood problems. Pushchenka says it’s not right to say all these are caused by Chernobyl; social and environmental problems are also to blame. But, she adds, ”you can see the numbers”.
Premature children
Later, Iryna Kalmanovich, a senior doctor in the hospital’s intensive-care unit, tours the wards, where she says they have daily evidence of a huge increase in premature children. In several cots are unmoving babies who, like Sasha, have hydrocephalus. One two-day-old boy is trembling due to a problem with his nervous system. Many of the tiny bodies are hooked to ventilators and drips. ”We can give life, but not quality of life,” says Kalmanovich, standing in the drab corridor, echoing with children’s chatter. ”The number of absolutely healthy newborns is around 25%, maybe 30% to 40%.”
She says the hospital is full of fallout from Chernobyl: ”Young women who were girls then, now they are becoming mothers and the health of those young women is not really good.”
In a small flat in another grey apartment block in the border town of Yelsk, Valentina and Victor Panfilenka live with their children, Anna (13), Anton (12) and seven-year-old Zenya, who has cerebral palsy. After Anton and Anna have played The Beatles’ Yesterday on accordion and flute and Zenya has shown off her exercise books, and tea has been served, the Panfilenkas offer an insight into why official statistics and local opinions differ.
As everyone whose illness is Chernobyl-related qualifies for extra state benefits, a bill that already costs 1% of the economy, the authorities have a reason to play down problems. ”A few doctors said, ‘Give us $2 000 and we’ll get the papers saying her illness is because of Chernobyl,”’ says Valentina Panfilenka. ”But we’re tired of proving [it]; we just don’t want to think about it now.”
Indirect impact
Other impacts are indirect. The IAEA’s report talks of a ”paralysing fatalism … negative self-assessments of health, belief in shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative and dependency on assistance from the state”. The post-explosion evacuation of 350 000 people scattered communities across the region and led to escalating rates of divorce, alcoholism and unemployment.
Belarus’s incarceration rate is the third highest in the world and nearly one in five people lives below the poverty line. People survive by growing small crops and keeping a cow or chickens, all feeding off contaminated land. The costs of Chernobyl are in the strain of caring for Sasha on Vitali and Tanya’s marriage, in the tears of the parents of a girl with a brain tumour called Ann Pesenko, children with rheumatism spending spring afternoons in hospital.
The IAEA concerns itself with deaths among an estimated 600 000 emergency workers and residents of the contaminated areas at the time; it has no intention of looking at their children. A report to be published this week by British scientists picked up on this theme. It repeats the IAEA’s finding that only thyroid cancer has increased, but adds: ”Most radiation-related solid [tumour] cancers continue to occur decades after exposure.”
The scientists found unexpected increases in thyroid cancer in children born after the isotopes of iodine believed responsible for it would have ceased to be a danger. ”It is still very early days in terms of evaluating the full radiological impact.”
In a small room in the almost abandoned town of Chernobyl, filled with the stench and scratching of hundreds of mice, such uncertainty will not be a big surprise. Viktor Krasnov, head of this radiobiological lab, also says research has focused on the relatively misunderstood impacts of long-term exposure to low radiation levels and found it can cause harm. ”The effect is definitely here,” he says. — Guardian Unlimited Â