Re: Re[2]: UKRAINE CHERNOBYL AFTERMATH NEWS ON INTERNET (fwd)

[John Goldsmith <gjohn@bgumail.bgu.ac.il>]

Dale asks if there are any peer-reviewed studies on Chernobyl health
effects and as one of the authors of such a study, dealing with 
such effects as we can observe in immigrants to Israel, it can be found 
in Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 103, October, 1995, p. 936-941.
     On the much larger populations remaining in the former Soviet Union, 
the International Conference on One Decade After Chernobyl of the 
European Commission, The IAEA, and WHO in April this year prepared a set 
of background papers on "Summing Up the Consequences", each of which 
carries the ridiculous and offensive legend "Unedited : Not to be 
Referenced or Quoted". I'll paraphrase.  Childhood thyroid cancer is the 
  only major health effect attributable to radiation exposure. If one 
  extrapolates from the Hiroshima-Nagasaki impact (and knowledgable persons 
  should not do so in my opinion) lifetime excess cancers can be expected 
  among liquidators and residents of contaminated areas of several thousand 
  each, but such numbers will be difficult to distinguish from the expected 
  background of cancer which would have occurred anyway. Up to now he 
  thyroid cancer in children has been reported for less than 500 children 
  in Belarus; slightly more than 100 were reported from Ukraine and slightly
  more than 20 from the Bryansk oblast in Russia.  Screening has not been 
  shown to be of value for detecting cases.     A perspective for estimated
  fatalities in the Ukraine compare about 200 premature deaths possibly 
  related to Chernobyl with over 10,000 possibly atributable to natural 
  radiation and nearly forty thousand due to  trauma.
	In my opinion if IAEA cannot edit its reports or allow them to be 
cited or referenced, they should return the public funds that support
the agency and go out of business.  I hope other radsafers will also 
object to this ill-conceived effort to censor the flow of such 
information as this. Apart from thyroid cancer in children, no confirmed
increase in cancer is cited in the Background Papers.
 gjohn@BGUMAIL.BGU.AC.IL   John Goldsmith, M.D.,M.P.H., Professor of
                             Epidemiology
                          Ben Gurion University, Israel