Re: Chernobyl health effects

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@pnl.gov>]

Peter Sandgren wrote:

Regarding the comment by Mr. Dukelow (from his email below) "Careful 
studies of the health consequences have not supported the "Thousands of 
people have died" statement you make." I offer this quote from the article 
entitled "Culture of Cancer" by Robert Masterson in the Hartford Advocate 
of Dec. 14-20, 2000:  "During the past decade, approximately 40,000 cleanup 
workers have died, mostly men in their 30s and 40s."  Offered from the "for 
what it's worth" department . . .
Peter Sandgren
Training Division
Connecticut Office of Emergency Management

Jim Dukelow responds:

I read Masterson's piece, which is available at
www.hartfordadvocate.com/articles/ukraine.html, and don't feel that it's worth
much.  Befitting its appearance in the Hartford Advocate, it is an advocacy
piece.  Masterson took a one or two week trip around the Ukraine, primarily
visiting regional and small town hospitals, accompanied by translators and
guides. He has some interesting observations about what can only be described as
a health care crisis in the Ukraine.  He prompts the doctors and other care
providers he visits to attribute a wide variety of medical problems to the
"radiation" and mostly reports that they respond by "rolling the eyes and
shrugging their shoulders".  There is little in the piece that is quantitative.
Masterson shows no particular familiarity with either science or medicine.  He
recoils in horror at one point with the revelation of a shed containing outdated
and past-date medical equipment and medicines, including "old-fashioned
blood-pressure devices filled with poisonous mercury".  I don't know about you,
but I have a mercury sphyngo-manometer at home and that's what all of my
physicians use in their offices.

There are a number of factual errors in Masterson's piece, some of them actually
understating the physical consequences of the accident.

The datum about "approximately 40,000 cleanup workers ... mostly men in their
30s and 40s" that are supposed to have died is sourced to the Ukrainian
government.  If you have been paying attention over the years, Ukrainian
government spokespersons have given an incredible variety of assessments of the
health consequences of Chernobyl.

Some more careful assessments of Chernobyl health effects can be found on the
web.  These include 1) February 1999 presentation slides of Oleg Belyakov of the
Institute of Physics and Biophysics of Salzburg and St. Bartholemew's and the
Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, available at
<www.graylab.ac.uk/usr/belyakov/present/> and 2) the November 1995 report
Chernobyl Ten Years On, An Assessment by the NEA Committee on Radiation
Protection and Public Health, available at
<www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/allchernobyl.html>.

The general picture that emerges is of a larger than expected spike in childhood
thyroid cancer in the most highly contaminated regions, a smaller than expected
increase in leukemia, lower general and cancer mortality rates for the
liquidators, but some striking increases in specific morbidity and mortality
rates that might reasonably be associated with psychological stress.  Issues of
confounding are significant, since the fall of the Soviet Union was accompanied
by a breakdown of the medical care system in the former republics and an
extraordinary upsetting of the entire social infrastructure, itself an obvious
source of psychological stress.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov

These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my
management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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