12/27/2023 0 Comments Art predicting chernobyl aftermath![]() ![]() He had been the head pediatrician in the province who treated the first victim children of Chernobyl. On our visit to Chernihev, 35 miles east of Chernobyl, we met a fearless pediatrician, Dr. Many unprotected people-notably young girls-developed thyroid cancer and required surgery to remove the thyroid, meaning that they had to live the rest of their lives taking thyroxin to replace the hormone their body no longer produced. ![]() At the time of the accident a radioactive cloud of iodide moved east of Chernobyl over the city of Chernihev. There we visited depressing hospitals and wards with young cancer patients, predominantly thyroid cancer. In 1996, 10 years after the incident, through a series of connections in the United Kingdom, I traveled to Ukraine with Maurice Frohn, well-known endocrinologist who specialized in thyroid cancer. My second cousins in Ukraine are officially classified as “Chernobyl Children” because of when and where they were born in proximity to the infamous reactor. The psychological state of the nation created new terms such as “radiophobia,” paranoia of harmful invisible radiation affecting everything in your life.Īs regular readers of this blog know, I am of direct Ukrainian heritage and have many relatives living in Ukraine. Long-term effects such as cancers are still being studied. In addition, the battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved more than 500,000 workers (called “liquidators”), many of whom died shortly after their duty. This was the worst nuclear accident in history in terms of cost and effect on health, the mental state of a nation and the world. Within 10 years of the incident, countless cases of radiation-induced cancer and other aliments were reaching epidemic proportions. As history has confirmed, this was a lie. Early Soviet medical reports claimed that little after-effects were either evident or expected from the people exposed. The afternoon after the disaster, 43,000 residents (including children) were evacuated by hundreds of buses. People breathed radioactive dust and debris as the Chernobyl cloud drifted high and far, eventually reaching remote parts of Europe. There was no news coverage of the incident. This was during the era of Soviet propaganda. The days after the explosion were filled with anxiety, sickness and gruesome death for the Ukrainian people of Pripyat, the planned “atom city” adjacent to the nuclear plant where workers and their dependents lived. The much-feared nuclear “positive void coefficient” disaster, where a runaway atomic reactor melts down and explodes tons of radioactive debris into the atmosphere, actually happened. In Chernobyl, Ukraine, on this day 30 years ago our planet experienced the harbinger of nuclear fission gone wrong. April 26, 1986, is a day that will live in infamy for Ukraine and the world. ![]()
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