Blood pressure. Children with hypertension, hypotension or normal. Complications.
ECG. arrhythmias, Long QT syndrome (LQTS), repolarisation disorders.
Clinical abnormalities. Heart defects.
—Gynaecology and Endocrinology: hormonal disorders at puberty in girls.
Collect the placenta for independent pathological examination to measure the amount of Caesium 137. Look at the fertility of local families over the last five years. Look at the levels of birth defects. Perinatal pathology.
Levels of autoantibodies against thyroid antigens or islets of Langerhans
Goiter, thyroid deficiency, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, type I diabetes:
—Infectious diseases: Number of children prescribed with antibiotic treatment, medical indications, hospitalisations. Recurrent diseases: chronic bronchitis, recurrent urinary infections.
—Surgery: fracture repair, quality and speed. Length of time for wounds to heal.
—Psychology: Achievement at school relative to chronological age. IQ. Absenteeism etc.
—Allergies: Bronchial asthma, age, severity, allergic dermatitis and others.
—Gastrointestinal: Gastritis, duodenitis, food allergies
—Oncology: Brain tumours, other malignancies, anaemia, lymphopenia, leukaemia.
Always based on the levels of caesium-137 load measured independently (and only known after the examination).
Only the statistician should receive both data records, when it is all in the computer, and will undertake the calculations based on the formulae mentioned in the plan, adopted before the study.
I have seen no proposals for scientific research into health from either the IRSN, from WHO’s IPHECA project, set up by the IAEA, from the ETHOS project, or from CORE. It is wilful ignorance, a desire to cover up the central problem: people can see and they know that the children living in the rural areas around Chernobyl are ill and that food produced here or gathered from the forest poses a danger, and is very difficult to sell”.
Dr. Michel Fernex
This is the nuclear gulag, financed by the West.
Part Five
NESTERENKO’S VILLAGES
Chapter I
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE CONTAMINATED VILLAGES
“Feeling pity for the plight of the victims or helping them, without engaging in a whole hearted denunciation of the strategy of the WHO/ IAEA lobby, will obviously result in the victims becoming habituated to the violence to which they are subjected and to “guarantee” the eventual repetition of the same scenario somewhere else in the world. Establishing radioprotection organisations that are independent of the nuclear industry is the only way to put an end to this scandal”.
YVES LENOIR, op.cit.
Belarus is a landscape of forests, lakes, ponds and rivers. But 26% of the forest and more than half of the cultivated fields on the banks of the rivers Pripyat, Dnieper and Sozh are situated in the radioactive zone. For twenty two years, until his death in 2008, Nesterenko undertook a rearguard action133, on his own, in hundreds of villages in these territories, publicising the true situation, and demanding at the very least, that the “norms”, or “admissible levels of contamination” as they are called, are respected. (In Belarus: Admissible levels of contamination—ALC).
133 Rearguard action; an attempt to prevent something from happening, even though it is probably too late to succeed, Collins English Dictionary.
1. THE ILLUSION OF “NORMS”
Through a number of different biological and physiological processes, the human organism is engaged in a daily struggle against incorporated toxic and radioactive substances that it eliminates. It is more or less successful in this, if the immune system is not weakened. Human beings heal and protect their bodies by leading a healthy and hygienic life, and above all, if the quantity of toxic substances ingested and inhaled is minimal and of short duration. In the territories contaminated by Chernobyl, people’s bodies are chronically incorporating radionuclides.
This is why Nesterenko’s fight can be described as a rearguard action. The norms invoked protect no-one. They were invented in order to legitimise politically the radioactive emissions released into the atmosphere by nuclear power stations. All the nuclear power stations in operation all over the world (about 450) release these emissions continually. During the symbolic trial, organised by the Permanent People’s Tribunal, of the management of the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster Rosalie Bertell explained these norms:
Routinely, all of the gases are released and all of the liquids are released, so the only effort made is to retain the solid radionuclides. When we talk about radioactive waste, it’s that solid portion only. By the design of the technology, we don’t know any way to constantly collect and store a gas. We just keep getting more and more gases, because we can’t contain them physically.
So what happens with the industry, is that they try to set a standard, and they say that as long as you keep the releases of gases and liquids below this standard, we’ll consider it acceptable to the population. If you go above that, it’s unacceptable. When you do that, and give those numbers to the engineers, they design an industry in order to be legal—everybody assumes that if it’s legal, it’s safe.[…]
If you deal with the engineers and physicists, they look at the standard and say, we stayed below it and therefore we are safe. If you talk to medical people, they’ll say that the standards are not protecting health. Therefore to be in compliance with standards does not always protect the worker, nor the public health.
[…] People are talking two different languages […] The workers and the public are often deceived by standards, they expect that a standard is there to protect them. Therefore, if they’re told their radiation exposure is within permissible limits, they think that they shouldn’t be sick, or that it’s their imagination…134
134 Rosalie Bertell, op.cit.
The UN agencies, subservient to the nuclear lobby, deprived of any rational scientific argument, have expressly adopted this all-purpose formula: the victims of Chernobyl are suffering from radiophobia and from stress, in fact, from “their imagination”. The safety norms are a psychological exercise, a verbal crutch for these illusionists, who must get the population to accept these unavoidable becquerels, a permanent feature of our “modern world” in which WHO hoped to find “a generation which has learnt to accommodate ignorance and uncertainty”. Nesterenko is a voice crying in the wilderness, not only because of the inherent deception in the very concept of a “norm”, but also because the Belarusian authorities, backed up by the international “experts”135, are advocating the resettlement of the evacuated territories. While what is really needed is a systematic government-run programme of information and prevention with pectin so that the inhabitants are warned of the danger and can learn to defend themselves against it.
135 See p. 71, “…so you will have to put up with 70 to 100 rem…”, a statement sanctioned, on the French side, by Monsieur Pellerin, who was present and raised no objections to his colleague from the ICRP, who threw out this response to Nesterenko.
The norm for life is zero artificial radionuclides in the human organism.
2. FIVE OF NESTERENKO’S VILLAGES
In 1990 and in 1998, with our cameraman Romano Cavazzoni and the sound engineer Nino Maranesi, we were sent to the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Belarus, to investigate a people abandoned to a nameless scourge that the scientific establishment refused to recognise. Then in 2000 and 2001, now retired, we went back there, but this time, with shared friendship, solidarity and indignation as professional journalists. Our job is to inform, and we could no longer stand idly by in the face of the persistent lies about the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, which we now experienced as provocation.
We recorded the silent tragedy of the peasant farmers imprisoned in this environment that was o
nce their friend and provider, where it was now dangerous to walk, to fish, to collect berries and mushrooms. An environment in which people fall ill or die simply because of what they eat, while an indifferent and avaricious world withholds the means that might be sufficient to save their fellow human beings. In Belarus, 2 million people including 500,000 children, eating food that is contaminated with caesium-137 and strontium-90, are living, humiliated and abandoned, in the centre of Europe. Condemned to a life of suffering, prematurely cut short.
In 1998, 2000 and 2001, accompanied by Vassili Nesterenko, we filmed the work of the teams from his radioprotection institute in five villages, among the hundreds ignored by the German scientists who conducted measurements in 1993. 136 The average radiation dose of the inhabitants, recorded in the 1991 and 1992 registers of the Republic of Belarus, was higher than 1 millisievert a year. All these villages are further from Chernobyl than the standard 15–30 km zone around nuclear power stations in the West, where the governments of these countries, supposedly, provide systems of radioprotection for the population. The villages we filmed are:
136 In 1,100 villages in Belarus the caesium-137 contamination in milk exceeds Russia’s accepted norm that has been set at 50 Bq/l. It should not be over 37 Bq/l. But even at this level it is still a “norm”, a poison.
Skorodnoie—2.6 mSv/y, 5–15 Ci/km², 90 km from the nuclear power station at Chernobyl;
Rosa Luxemburg—2.2 mSv/y, 5–15 Ci/km², 72 km from the nuclear power station at Chernobyl;
Olmany—3.0 mSv/y, 5–15 Ci/km², 210 km from the nuclear power station at Chernobyl;
Slobodka—1.5 mSv/y, 5–15 Ci/km², 70 km from the nuclear power station at Chernobyl;
Valavsk—1.3 mSv/y, 5–15 Ci/km², 96 km from the nuclear power station at Chernobyl.
1998
On 29th May 1998, we left Minsk with Nesterenko for Polessie, a natural paradise in the south of the country, half in Ukraine and half in Belarus, at the very centre of the area in which Chernobyl exploded. We were returning there, after our first visit eight years earlier, with this extraordinary person as our guide. We wanted to gain a better understanding, from as close to the victims as possible, of the mechanisms that had reduced them to the status of guinea pigs and to document the radioprotection work undertaken by Nesterenko in the face of the Ministry of Health’s inertia. After a night in Mozyr, on the very edge of the 100 km zone traced around Chernobyl on the map, we joined the teams from his independent institute in their work, measuring the children from the most contaminated villages using a Human Radiation Spectrometer (HRS), and at the same time teaching families new hygiene techniques.
Chapter II
SKORODNOIE
2.6 mSv/year, 5–15 Ci/km²; 10 km from an area contaminated
with 15–40 Ci/km², and 90 km from Chernobyl
1998
Nesterenko and the female assistant in charge of the radiological monitoring centre are looking at the measurements taken by Vladimir Babenko, chief engineer at the Belrad laboratory. Behind the door, in the school corridor, about fifty children are waiting to take their turn on the armchair that measures their radioactivity. The number of becquerels is not shown in figures, but the level of caesium is shown rising vertically on the screen. Nesterenko comments:
Nesterenko.—This boy has quite a high number of becquerels, I can see it in the curve. It’s risen to a peak… According to the Ministry of Health, people are not interested in being measured. Look how many children have come.
Radioactivity is measured in becquerels. The presence of 50 becquerels per kilo bodyweight in the human body means, for example, that in a child who weighs 10 kilos, there are 500 artificial radioactive atoms disintegrating every second. The normal level should be zero becquerels of caesium-137 in the organism. This Human Radiation Spectrometer (HRS) is an automatic machine, that is very sensitive. If a person has only accumulated 200 becquerels in the whole of his body, this armchair will detect it. The back of the chair contains a crystal, in general of caesium iodide or of sodium iodide. When the person sits down and presses his back against the chair, the radiation emanating from his body strikes the crystal which emits a light beam. Behind the crystal there is a photomultiplier detector, a device that receives the beam and converts it into an electrical impulse. The signal is transmitted by an electronic spectroscopic system that determines which isotope is involved: whether it is potassium or caesium-134 or -137. The computer calculates the result. Normally, the majority of the machines provided by the administration detect levels between 800 and 1000 Bq in an adult body. Whereas this one detects levels at 200 Bq. This armchair was conceived specifically for measuring children. And, as you see, it can be moved around. It can be transported by car to any village in Belarus. It is this feature that makes it so suited to the unique situation that resulted from the Chernobyl accident. The government system is based around machines that are fixed. They have them in the capital, and in the provincial and regional towns but not in the villages, even though it is the inhabitants of the villages that receive the highest radiation doses. After three minutes, we know the exact level of internal radiation in the child’s organism. Between the 8th and 10th May this year, we gave them pectin tablets. Twenty days have gone by, and they have taken this food additive twice a day. Among most of the children, about 30% of the radionuclides have already been eliminated. And today we have a child who is completely free of radionuclides. Given how little money we have, this is a very effective defence system. Besides, it is incredibly important that the parents are informed about the food products they are eating.
Q.—Is the government doing anything about all this?
Nesterenko.—You could ask the person in charge of the nursery when was the last time the health service did any measurements here.
The assistant.—Never.
Nesterenko.—There’s your answer. They’re not measuring the children. Even though this village should be a priority.
Q.—Do you publish your figures?
Nesterenko.—I publish them in a three-monthly bulletin at the institute, which I then send to the Ministry of Health, to the local authorities, to the office of the President of Belarus, to the Council of Ministers, to the Supreme Soviet, to the Ministry of Instruction, and to anyone who could help.
Q.—Are you able to publish it freely or do they put obstacles in your way?
Nesterenko.—This year, we have not had any problems with them yet.137 But for some time now, they have started to limit our activities. In 1993 we had 370 local radiological monitoring centres (LRMC), and now there are only 79, and not all of them are financed by the government.
137 It is 1998, and the attacks on Nesterenko from the Ministry of Health would begin in spring 2000. See p. 218.
In February this year, the president of the Swiss Green Cross, Roland Wiederkehr, who is also a Deputy, visited our institute. We talked about the problems of funding so as not to have to depend on government aid. There are 567 villages where the milk is contaminated above the authorised levels138, and I think if we had 100 centres in these areas, going from one village to another, we would get a full picture of the situation and we would understand how best to help the people. Wiederkehr suggested that I go to Switzerland and give a series of talks at the universities to launch an appeal for funds for a programme of radioprotection for the children and to monitor their contamination. I went to Switzerland in April, I gave talks in Bern, Basle, Zurich, other universities, I went to Soleure, gave a talk in St. Gallen. We came to an agreement with the Green Cross, that they would collect money so that children could spend a period of convalescence in the summer in clean areas in Belarus. This programme has already been decided between us. About thirty LRMCs will be financed by the Green Cross, if they collect sufficient funds. It’s one way to ensure that the monitoring of contamination is really independent.
138 These figures date fr
om 1998. In 2005, the Minister published a figure of 111 villages. These official figures decrease every year: in 2001, 325 villages; in 2003, 216; in 2004, 165…Nesterenko contests the figures. The Ministry’s figures are based on an annual measurement of contamination in milk in each village. It should be measured four to six times a year, according to the different seasons, and the “radiological quality” of the fodder which depends on where the animals have been grazing. The measurements taken by the Belrad Institute show that contamination in agricultural products, especially in the private sector, is not decreasing. Quite the contrary, as has been shown in the example of Olmany, where ETHOS works.
Since then, unfortunately, Wiederkehr has been removed from his post and the Green Cross has done nothing more, while Nesterenko has received no explanation from them.
Q.—The Green Cross is an association. The lack of interest from governments is astonishing.
Nesterenko.—Yes, it’s very unfortunate. That’s why I’ve begun to approach international NGOs. For example, the programme set up by Adi Roche, that monitors contamination in children, has great support among the Irish people. I can tell you that there is not one government organisation that gives any concrete help towards the radioprotection of the people living here. I am hoping that these appeals will finally allow me to set up these laboratories. It’s very important now that, in Ukraine, we have discovered an effective product like the pectin-based adsorbent Yablopect. In Norway, for example, a teacher wrote to all the schools and universities. She came up with this plan: three Norwegian schoolchildren would save one Belarusian schoolchild. She came in person to give us the money, we were able to buy pectin tablets for the children; we distributed them and we tested to see how effective they were. At Bremen, at the press club, during the course of one evening, journalists collected enough to buy tablets for 100 children.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 42
