Ofrene for Tsjernobyl-katastrofen telles nå til 3.5 millioner mennesker.
Mer enn en tredjedel av dem barn.
Men hva er "verden" opptatt av i dag? "The FBI has snatched (!) Elian
Gonzalez"
osv. (dette er CNNs og BBCs beskrivelse av at folkeretten blir fulgt).
Hysteriet når stadig nye høyder. Og George Bush II alias Ronald Reagan III
alias Rambo XXVII kommer stadig nærmere premieren.
Goebbels kunne ikke gjort det bedre.
Karsten Johansen
Chernobyl kills and cripples 14 years after blast
April 21, 2000 Web posted at: 2:54 PM EDT (1854 GMT)
KIEV, Ukraine (Reuters) -- Fourteen years after the world's worst nuclear
disaster, the Chernobyl power plant is still killing people, Ukraine's
Health Ministry said Friday.
Some 3.5 million people, more than a third of them children, have fallen ill
as a result of the contamination while the incidence of some cancers is 10
times the national average.
"The health of people affected by the Chernobyl accident is getting worse
and worse every year," Deputy Health Minister Olha Bobyleva told a news
conference. "We are very disturbed by these data."
Chernobyl's number four reactor exploded in the early hours of April 26,
1986, spreading a poisonous radioactive cloud over much of Ukraine, Russia,
Belarus and parts of Western Europe.
Soviet officials, who initially tried to hush up the tragedy, acknowledged
in the end that the accident had killed 31 people and affected thousands more.
Scale of tragedy greater than thought
But the real scale of the catastrophe, which displaced hundreds of thousands
of people and turned bustling villages and towns into ghost towns populated
only by stray dogs and crows, has turned out to be far greater than once
thought.
Official data show that the health of some 3.5 million people, including
1.26 million children, was affected in this impoverished nation of 50 million.
Children and emergency workers sent in to clean up the contaminated areas
are among the worst affected.
The death rate among those living in contaminated areas is 18.28 percent per
1,000, compared to a national average of 14.8 percent.
Bobyleva said high radiation had led to an outbreak of diseases of the
nervous, blood and respiratory systems. She said the number of these
diseases among children affected by the accident was 17 percent higher than
the national average.
The rate of thyroid cancer remains 10 times higher than normal among
Ukrainian children. The ministry reported 1,400 cases of thyroid cancer
between 1986 and 2000, while no cases were registered between 1981 and 1985.
Bobyleva said the ministry was particularly worried by an increase in deaths
of emergency workers, popularly called "liquidators," most of whom are still
under 50. The death rate in the group is double the national average.
She said the consumption of radioactive food produced in the country's most
contaminated northern and central regions of Kiev, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr,
Cherkassy and Rivne posed another danger for public health.
A lack of cash and other economic problems have further complicated the
situation. Cash-strapped Ukraine has spent $1.4 billion to date to fight the
consequences of the accident.
Ukraine has promised it will close Chernobyl's last operational reactor by
the end of this year.
Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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