During our stay in Belarus in 2000, I asked Nesterenko if he thought Western scientists had a clear view of these questions and were acting in good faith?
V. Nesterenko.—There is a total lack of understanding about our situation in the international scientific community. Let me use Lengfelder as an example. Here is what he wrote in response to my proposition to distribute pectin-based food additives. “They would be better off eating fresh apples. In general it would be better if families were brought into the schools and it was explained to them that it is dangerous to eat contaminated produce. If they were not eating contaminated produce, they would not need to be given pectin, which in any case, would cost more money”. I told Lengfelder that if the peasants received the same monthly salary as he did, they and their families would be able to eat clean food. But since their salary is not 10,000 marks, nor 1,000, nor 100, but only 30 dollars, it’s obvious that they are going to be eating what they grow in their gardens and what they can gather from the forest. The international community needs to realise this. The countries that use nuclear energy should set up an insurance fund to help these people. It would not be a charity, I consider it a duty of the international community to help the people here survive in these conditions.
Q.—But what explains this hostility to pectin?
—It was Lengfelder who suddenly began to oppose its use, and I’ve no idea why. Personally, I think, and it may sound a bit harsh and brutal, that they are interested in conducting an experiment. This is how these pseudo-scientists work: they make observations, they diagnose, and they record the number of illnesses. But they do nothing to reduce these illnesses. I think our work with pectin prevents the collection of pure scientific data.
It’s true that Lengfelder set up a laboratory here in Minsk and another in Gomel. But all they do is diagnosis. They do nothing to tackle the real cause of the illnesses—the contamination. Let’s be clear, I don’t think that pectin is a universal panacea. But it’s an effective product, which works, given that the population is not going to be evacuated from the contaminated territories. We have seen Bandazhevsky’s work and we are convinced that children must not have more than 50 Bq/kg in their body. Yesterday we were measuring children: all had levels above this. Every child had a range of different illnesses, affecting different organs of the body. These are all children born after Chernobyl. It means that if we do not decontaminate them, a whole generation will grow up ill.
—But why this war on pectin?
I kept asking, even though Nesterenko had already answered me. The terrifying explanation, that Svetlana Savrasova had hardly dared believe, came back to me. The human guinea pigs needed to be experimentally pure, unchanged. Hannah Arendt, describing Eichman, talked of the banality of evil: stupid, bereft of intelligence, of moral conscience and emotion, as flat and calculated as a train timetable, and it seems to be the guiding force now around Chernobyl. Because the petty evil men who carry out their orders in the nuclear gulag, are covered by the official scientific truth sanctioned by the highest political authorities in the world. Humanity caught in its own trap. Not one government dissenting.
V. Nesterenko.—You want to know why? Because if pectin is administered three or four times a year, it really can lower, by a factor of two or three, the annual concentration of radionuclides in the child, in other words they will be less ill. Our food is contaminated. I think, I hope, that if France or Germany had the misfortune of experiencing such an accident, contaminated produce would be banned and everyone would eat clean food. But here, the government can’t provide it, and the people can’t afford to buy it. They eat what they grow.
I wrote to the Minister of Health. I can understand why he is against it. But their job was to guarantee the safety of the inhabitants. They should have organised the production of pectin. Tackled the problem and found ways to obtain it. And they should have done it in 1986. It’s 2000, fourteen years have gone by87.
87 2006, twenty years have gone by… (Author’s note)
Deputy Minister Orekhovsky told me: “Pectin does nothing. It only eliminates heavy metals. As regards radionuclides, no-one knows. It’s better to eat apples”.
I think they didn’t want to recognise that there had been mass contamination. We encountered enormous opposition to the use of Human Radiation Spectrometers (HRS). But thanks to the international appeal that we launched, we received the help we needed. Ireland is a small country but, following Adi Roche’s initiative, it supplied us with 5 mini buses and spectrometers. Germany gave money too. America also. But it was only NGO’s who helped us. It allowed us to measure 50,000 children. We have already distributed pectin to 15,000 children. With the financial support of the Assistance Committee “Children of Chernobyl” ELFI and Walter Meusburger (Austria), we measured 1000 children last year, and gave them pectin for a year. The train has left the station…Lengfelder is too late to stop it.
That was in 2000. At the beginning of 2006, when I was finalising the French edition of this book, the picture was not as rosy as Nesterenko hoped when we had that conversation. Lengfelder continued his attacks against the use of pectin and finally got his way. Following an initiative from the German Green Party deputy, Gila Altman, who, in 2003, was the secretary of state at the Ministry of Environment and of Nuclear Safety, the German government provided funding for a three-stage radioprotection project for the children in Belarus, to be jointly undertaken between 2002 and 2004, by the Research Centre “Julich” (Germany) and the Institute “Belrad”. The third stage, which consisted of monitoring the effectiveness of the pectin cure in families following a stay in a sanatorium, was cancelled. According to Gila Altman, Lengfelder threatened to provoke a scandal in German scientific circles if the government gave money for this follow up in the villages. The “train” that we thought had left the station, was moving very slowly with frequent stops. Lack of money was a constant anxiety.
The United States (MacArthur Foundation),88 whose considerable financial support had provided some long term security for Nesterenko’s institute, abandoned them five years ago. Also ELFI and England. The Swiss Green Cross backed out of a project that had been put together under M.Wiederkehr, who was president at the time, following an attack on the use of pectin by Mrs Frenzel at a symposium at Soleure in 1998.The Italians made huge promises but nothing ever came of them: they preferred to deal with the Belarusian authorities, while the health catastrophe grew worse year on year. An important project with the Julich institute, which was to be financed with 80,000 euros from the German government in the autumn, fell through, apparently because of the failure of the Green Party at the elections. Not to mention the eight or ten projects that had been put forward, after enormous expenditure in time and effort, to various international financial bodies, five of them at the European Commission. All were rejected for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained, or not explained at all… There remained a few faithful organisations from France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Ireland and a new recruit from Spain, that were able to offer sporadic and limited funds to help with Nesterenko’s projects.89 The salaries that he is able to pay to his forty or so colleagues at the institute are among the lowest in Minsk. Some of his staff had to leave. From one month to the next, Belrad, the independent institute of radioprotection, risks closure from lack of funds. As I write, in February 2006, funding from the NGOs has dried up, signatures on various projects are late in arriving and Nesterenko tells me that he does not know how he is going to pay salaries in March or April…
88 It is understandable that America disagrees with the Lukashenko regime, but it should not punish the population.
89 FRANCE: Enfants de Tchernobyl Belarus—ETB, 65, quai Mayaud F-49400 SAUMUR [email protected], http://enfants-tchernobyl-belarus.org ; France-Libertés-Fondation Danielle Mitterand, 22 rue de Milan, 75009 Paris, [email protected]; Association Solidarité de Biélorussie et de Tchernobyl
, 74 rue de Falaise, 14000 Caen, [email protected]; Les Enfants de Tchernobyl, 1 A, rue de Lorraine, F-68840 PULVERSHEIM, [email protected], www.lesenfantsdetchernobyl.fr.
BELGIUM: Association belgo-biélorusse pour les enfants de Tchernobyl (ASBL), 16 rue Marache, 5031 Grand-Leez, [email protected]
GERMANY: Jugends Aktions Netzwerk Umwelt und Naturchutz e.V. (JANUN) Gr.Barlinge 58a, 30171 Hannover; NIKOBELA, Grosse Drakenburger Strasse, 3, 31582 Nienburg
AUSTRIA: Tirol hilft den Kinder von Tschernobyl, A-6521 Fliess 111a, Tirol.
IRELAND: Chernobyl Children’s Project, 8 Sidneyville, Bellevue Park, St Luke’s, Cork, [email protected].
The article published by Dr Pflugbeil, in the journal Zeit-Fragen, No. 10 of 17th March 2003, could explain the real motivations of a seemingly senseless war against pectin waged by some very powerful interests—a war with criminal consequences.
3. HUMAN GUINEA PIGS
ARE THE CHILDREN OF CHERNOBYL BEING USED
AS GUINEA PIGS BY THE UNITED STATES?
Doctor Sebastian Pflugbeil, president of the Radioprotection Association , Berlin.
Are the authorities in Minsk aware of the background to the United States thirty year diagnostic programme monitoring the Belarusian victims of Chernobyl?[…]
In 1994, the United States Ministry for Energy approached the Ministry of Health in Belarus with a proposal for a joint scientific project, called BelAm, that was to last at least thirty years. The aim of the project was to undertake a long term study to establish how many cases of cancer and other thyroid illnesses would appear among groups of people living in Belarus, who had received different levels of radioactive iodine from the Chernobyl reactor. About 13,000 people were selected, who were to receive regular examinations over the next three decades. […]
A number of institutes and individuals were chosen in Belarus to co-operate: Highly placed scientists from the Ministry of Health, under the direction of the Minister himself, the Institute of Radiological Medicine and Endocrinology attached to it, its affiliates in Minsk and Gomel, the specialist dispensary in Gomel and other clinics. On the American side, the partner organisation was the National Cancer Institute of the United States government. Financial arrangements were made and the contract signed. The project has already been going for six years. […]
According to the agreement, the BelAm project is only concerned with the diagnosis, screening and epidemiology of thyroid disease. Once the cancer has been discovered, America is no longer interested: it becomes Belarus’s problem. It’s hard to believe, but Belarus on behalf of its own patients, never asked the United States to offer appropriate treatment or even finance for that treatment, for the thyroid disease that was discovered, as an integral part of the project. The people of Belarus are quite simply the guinea pigs in an enormous radiological laboratory, from which the United States are gathering their scientific data. […]
On 1st April 1996, after a long inquiry, British television showed the film “Chernobyl Ten Years After”, in which it is shown that of all the countries taking part in research around Chernobyl, it is the United States that is most vigorously opposed to the establishment of a correlation between radioactive iodine and thyroid cancer. “The American government has particular reasons for its defensiveness. In the 1950s, the United States Ministry of Energy deliberately released a cloud of radioactive iodine into the atmosphere in order to verify whether it was possible to observe the trace of a radioactive cloud. This increased the contamination that had already been caused by the nuclear weapons testing. […]
Today, the victims are demanding compensation from the government for damages. The government is contesting these claims based on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence linking radioactive iodine with an increase in thyroid cancer.
The victims in the United States argue that the dramatic increase in thyroid cancer after Chernobyl constitutes the definitive proof of the correlation between the damaging effect of iodine liberated into the atmosphere. Scientific experts from the American government—the same people with whom Belarus is collaborating on the BelAm project—are contesting this argument also and say that long term research needs to be done within the CIS before an opinion can be formed with any certainty. Under current American legislation, the government in Washington expects compensation to run into billions of dollars, whereas the BelAm project is costing them 1% of that figure (10 million dollars)! In all likelihood, this is a political and legal stratagem devised by the US, in which the BelAm project (UkrAm in Ukraine) will unfold over decades in order to achieve some “clarification of the issue”. How many of the American victims will still be alive in thirty years to claim their rights when the research is finally completed after 30 years? It becomes very clear then, that the United States’ principal interest is to have absolute control over the science, the data and the information concerning thyroid cancer that has resulted from Chernobyl. Why does Belarus lend a hand in these machinations?
From the point of view of medical ethics in the United States and in Europe, scientific research on patients who are ill is not admissible unless, right from the outset, the treatment of the patient is guaranteed. Why should this be different, just because United States research is being conducted in Belarus? […]
Western countries which depend on nuclear power, would like to establish, with the aid of another scientific project in Belarus, absolute control over the medical information on thyroid cancer. The United States, Japan and the European Community Commission—a kind of nuclear alliance—have imposed on the Ministry of Health in the Republic of Belarus (and the Ministries of Health in the Ukraine and Russia) a project for the creation of a tissue bank and data about thyroid cancer following Chernobyl. The West, with a majority of representatives, decides which scientific group in the world will be authorised to conduct research on tissue taken during operations, in order to avoid “cross publications” […] and to reach “successful” conclusions, as it states in the project description.
The promoters of the project would be concerned, above all, with the correlation between thyroid cancer following Chernobyl and not only radioactive iodine but also with the genetic component of the disease and with environmental pollution that might cause cancer90, so that in the final analysis, it might be the faulty genes of people in Belarus, or the polluted environment, and not radioactive iodine that are to blame for the dramatic increase in thyroid cancer. Although no contract has been signed with Belarus, the project has been going on already for several years, with agreement from Minsk. And once again, the alliance is only interested in scientific data, while patients in Belarus are quite free to look after themselves.
90 Unfortunately, the author ignores one essential radiological factor that is jointly responsible for a number of pathologies at Chernobyl: the chronic accumulation of caesium especially in the thyroid gland. It is not only Bandazhevsky’s work that has proved that, particularly in young children, caesium accumulates more in this gland than in most of the organs or tissues, but also, that isotopes of caesium were used, in scanners, in Western Europe, in the 1960’s to locate nodules in the thyroid. As a general rule, the IAEA and experts would prefer us to forget the role of Cs-137 as a cause of illness, in particular in paediatrics. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration), on the other hand, is extremely worried about Cs-137 and has called on pharmaceutical firms to develop and register products to protect people and the army in case of an accident like Chernobyl, or following the use of a dirty bomb that might release Cs-137.
But let us now return to the year 2000 and take up the story of what is on the point of disappearing.
V. Nesterenko.—In September 1998, we went to the village of Sivitsa near Minsk. The children had levels of caesium-137 measuring 340 Bq/kg. We had distributed pectin four times over the year. We had taken measurements before and after each three week cure. Now all the children had levels bel
ow 40 Bq/kg. During the year, we had succeeded in lowering their levels by a factor of 8. In another village, Polessie, situated in the Chernobyl zone, where conditions were even worse, we had succeeded in halving the levels of contamination. Now we had irrefutable proof. The really important fact was that doctors from Bandazhevsky’s institute were examining the children in parallel to our measurements. They examined electrocardiograms, the state of the immune system, and they had shown that the product acted as an antioxidant, eliminating allergens from the system, eliminating heavy metals, like lead. People say: “It’s not possible that a simple apple can do that”. But we all know the saying “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Because pectin really is a very unique natural substance. The way it works is very interesting. The pectin that you take is not digested in the stomach. It swells and passes into the digestive tract, in the large intestine, where the food is transformed into amino acids. Soluble radioactive caesium (Cs-137) is present in this liquid. Pectin cannot be assimilated into the organism. It fixes the caesium and eliminates it through the digestive tract.
There is another mechanism that is even more important. We all have deposits—that’s what they’re called. It is in the muscles, in tissues, that caesium forms a sediment. Caesium is the exact chemical equivalent of potassium. We know that the heart muscle contains 20 times more potassium than any other muscle in the body. It also contains much more caesium, given that it is the chemical equivalent of potassium. The more active the muscle, the more radioactive caesium it will accumulate. Pectin powder is very fine, 50–70 microns. It can pass through vessel walls and gets into the blood. It penetrates these deposits, capturing the caesium and eliminates it through the kidneys. These two mechanisms have been studied in clinical experiments in Russia and in Ukraine at Krivoi Rog91. We no longer have any doubt about the capacity of this product to adsorb lead, cadmium, mercury and radionuclides. But it has no effect on the oligoelements that the metabolism needs: copper, zinc, iron, manganese, selenium, potassium etc. Thank God, and his creation.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 34
