Re[2]: Chernobyl Health Study Findings (fwd)

[maay100@bgumail.bgu.ac.il (Quastel)]

        This is in response to Dale E. Boyce's query and to the assertion
by Mike Russel that leukemias are up.

        I just came back from a 3rd meeting on the health effects of
Chernobyl at the IAEA in Vienna, the first two having been held in Geneva
(WHO) and Minsk (EC).

        It is becoming generally accepted that there has been a marked
increase in the incidence of thyroid papillary cancer in children starting
about 5 years after the accident and that it was due to exposure to
radioiodines (I-131 and short lived sisters). Note that this is normally a
rare disease (about 0.5 cases per million). Its incidence has gone up in
Belarus by a factor of about 100 or more, and is still climbing (though it
is still a rare disease). Lesser increases in the incidence of childhood
thyroid cancer have also been observed in the Ukraine and in
radiocontaminated areas of southern Russia in the Briansk region.

        Surprisingly, no documented increase of leukemia or any other
cancer has been proven, although this might have been expected 10 years
after the accident. It is possible of course that it will be found in the
future.

        Another conclusion of these conferences has been the importance of
psychosocial factors, which can be detected 10 years after the accident,
and the role of psychosomatic effects. These effects may turn out to be the
the major health concern of the accident. My colleagues Dr. Julie Cwikel
and Anna Abdelgani here at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel
have found evidence for post-traumatic stress disorder in immigrants to
Israel who came from the former Soviet Union from areas near Chernobyl (in
comparison to controls matched for age, sex and date of immigration)
..
        One of the problems has been the extreme difficulty of carrying out
controlled epidemiological studies in the affected regions. It seems to me
that unless multinational, cooperative, controlled and long term
prospective studies are realistically designed, funded and carried out,
most of the potential information on the health effects of low dose
radiation resulting from the Chernobyl accident will probably be lost.

                                Michael Quastel