[ RadSafe ] Manual For Survival – A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

[Roger Helbig]

Since it was posted here, I expect it does not bode well for the
nuclear industry, but I wonder if there are chinks in the armor of
this new "so-called" more comprehensive report of what happened to
people as a result of Chernobyl.   Sounds a lot like a repackaging of
the already refuted New York Academy of Sciences Book edited by Dr
Janette Sherman, who herself made claims of measuring radioactivity on
the banks of the Potomac after the 9/11 Pentagon Attack.

Roger Helbig

Manual For Survival – A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

by Christina MacPherson
Science 6th March 2019 Two decades after Chernobyl, the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and
the United Nations (UN) Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic
Radiation stated that “fewer than 50 deaths had been directly
attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly
exposed rescue workers,” because radiation levels were considered too
low to have caused any detectable harm. This conclusion was based on
data derived from the atomic bomb survivors life-span study, a program
that began in 1950 to document the long-term health effects of the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian scientists vehemently disputed
this assessment, estimating Chernobyl-linked fatalities in the
hundreds of thousands. The UN agencies later recognized a broader
spectrum of Chernobyl-related health effects,
yet the idea that there were no long-term consequences to human health
proved hard to dislodge.

The UN-WHO-IAEA assessment was repeated in many venues and was cited
by journalists as a scientific consensus. After the Fukushima nuclear
accident in 2011, residents in the affected region were told by
experts from many of the same international institutions that there
would be no direct long-term health effects because their radiation
exposure was low.

Because there was no post-Chernobyl equivalent to the atomic bomb
survivors life-span study, the argument went, the data on the Japanese
survivors remained the gold standard of international nuclear
regulations.
The notion that no such data existed, however, was not entirely true
as regards Chernobyl. Kate Brown’s meticulously researched Manual for
Survival is the first environmental and medical history that recovers
decades-long efforts of scientists and doctors in Ukraine and Belarus
to document the long-term health impacts from the Chernobyl meltdown.
Unlike the Japanese atomic bomb survivors life-span study, which began
5 years after the exposure, Soviet doctors worked in contaminated
areas right after the Chernobyl accident—many of these areas populated
by people who didn’t
know that they were exposed to radiation. Over the years, Soviet
scientists amassed vast evidence of a broad range of debilitating
health effects from low-level radiation, including cancers; anemia;
gastrointestinal problems; and severe disorders of the liver, kidneys,
thyroid, and other organs.
The individuals who collected these data risked their careers and
lives, enduring harassment from regional politicians and Soviet secret
police and accumulating radioactive isotopes in their own bodies.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2019/03/06/manual-for-survival/