This is a summary of what I learned from Nesterenko that day. In 2006, to continue to purify and to protect a child’s organism, after some of the contamination has been eliminated following a visit abroad, would only cost about 100 euros a year: this is the cost of an effective, pectin-based heavy metal adsorbent and of anthropogammametric measurements of the contamination of the child’s organism. But pectin on its own is not enough. A short stay abroad, or in a sanatorium in Belarus with clean food is necessary but not enough. By combining the two methods, it is possible to keep the child’s level of internal contamination low enough to avoid the danger of serious damage to the organism. In Belarus alone, there are 500,000 children who need this treatment, and the cost of this would be 50 million euros. Nesterenko has not got this amount of money.
The cost to the rich countries of waging two days war against Belgrade (400 million dollars according to the American bank Merrill Lynch) would have covered eight years of treatment. Money is available for killing but not for living. I made this calculation during the bombardment of Serbia by NATO. Since then, with the war in Iraq, a few hours would suffice to obtain the same result.
1. THE FATHER WHO IS FOND OF FISH
Two little children look on in silence as the adults talk above their heads. Professor Nesterenko is reprimanding the father.
Nesterenko.—So, you ate some fish, did you?
The father.—A little bit.
—Did you have it tested?
—No, we didn’t test it but they said it was good.
—What does that mean, “good”?
—They tested it and they said we could eat it. It was within the limits.
—But you know that children should not eat anything above 37 Bq. If they eat food with 37 Bq, they will have an accumulated level of close to 40 Bq. While your children have 70. We’ll measure this one now. Are you a fisherman?
—Yes, amateur.
—It’s all clear. We’ve finally understood why although the milk is clean, the children are contaminated.
—Before your previous visit, they weren’t eating fish. They just had a little bit only a week ago.
—I can remember one mother who had two children. They went to collect blueberries. Just once, when I had come in June. The children’s level of radioactivity did not go back to normal for a year. They had eaten roughly half a litre of berries. With fish, it’s the same thing. Officially, the admissible level is 370 Bq/kg. If it’s 350 Bq/kg they will say it’s clean. But children should not go above 37 Bq/kg—in other words ten times less—whatever the food product. When you bring fish back home, at least put it in salt water (two spoons of salt for each litre of water) and let it soak for six hours. Even better: soak it for three hours, throw the water away and start again. I promise you, with salt water, you can get rid of 70 % of the radionuclides. That is, if you really can’t go without fish. I understand that the family income today is low.
—They didn’t eat very much, they just tasted it. I was eating and they said “Dad! Give us a little bit just to taste”. That’s all they ate.
2. THE WOMAN SELLING MUSHROOMS
This peasant woman had brought her 5 year old daughter from a village some distance away to be measured.
Nesterenko.—Of course, 61 Bq per kilo is much too much. If she had 20, I would say there was no problem. But…
The mother.—I’ve got four children, and each one has a different level.
Nesterenko.—What were the others?
The mother.—90, 80, and 116.
Nesterenko.—If you say the milk is clean, there must be something else. Do they eat mushrooms? We can assume that 30 of the 60 becquerels is coming from the milk. What else is there?
The mother.—(she is justifying herself) But someone buys them from us, our dried mushrooms!
Nesterenko.—The fact that other people buy them from you is their concern. But I am worried about your children. They are all contaminated above safe levels. According to the research done by Professor Bandazhevsky in Gomel, pathologies begin to appear in the vital organs and systems if the level is above 30–50 Bq/kg body weight. Why expose them to that? Give us the mushrooms to be tested! We will measure them. Do you use dried berries?
The mother.—We make jam from them.
Nesterenko.—Alright, then bring us the jam and we will measure that too. OK? We will wait for you. (She goes off). Why don’t they bring the food to be tested? They could bring the mushrooms. If she knew…
The assistant.—They know they’re contaminated.
Nesterenko.—So? Is that any reason to contaminate the children?
The assistant.—They’ve got to eat something.
Nesterenko.—So what are you saying? There’s nothing else to eat?
The assistant.—They’re just eating what they normally eat. They don’t really understand the situation properly.
Nesterenko.—But if she had them measured, perhaps she would understand. The little girl is still young, but later on, it is she who will suffer. You can see how much she has accumulated. She has taken the tablets, and eliminated a little bit, but it will all start again. This is the blueberry season and her mother is going to give them to her to eat.
The assistant.—Yes, she will.
Nesterenko.—As for the girolles mushrooms, they contain several thousand becquerels per kilo. Several thousand.
The assistant.—Tens of thousands. In the area she lives, it’s tens of thousands.
Nesterenko.—No really, if they eat the mushrooms, it’s hopeless. 100 Bq/l in the milk, and then the mushrooms…
Q.—Why is the milk radioactive? Where are the cows grazing?
The assistant.—Their pasture is quite far away. They have to cross the woods.
Nesterenko.—And in the woods, they graze on the grass. In the woods, the grass is always radioactive.
3. THE NURSE’S SON IS NO LONGER CONTAMINATED
Q.—Is this the first time that your son has not been contaminated?
Elena Shulga.—The first time. I never even hoped. When they told me yesterday, I was relieved.
—The child does not feel too restricted because he isn’t allowed to play in those areas that are dangerous?
—No, why? I let him go to the river.
—And in the forest?
—The forest, no… We don’t eat berries, we don’t eat mushrooms. Never. Not just the children, none of us eat them.
—Your life has changed?
—Of course. The forest for us is a support. There are berries, mushrooms. The forest supplies us with many things, but now we have to do without them. It’s the same with the vegetable garden where there is radioactivity. It’s everywhere. Wherever you go, there is radioactivity.
—So you’ve lost the forest and in part the vegetable garden?
—We still grow the things we used to grow before, like potatoes and vegetables.
—Do you get them tested, the potatoes?
—We were getting them tested before. This year, we haven’t.
—And it’s not dangerous?
—Of course it’s dangerous.
—But why don’t you have them tested? What stops you? Is it difficult to get them measured? You have a monitoring centre in your area!
—I can’t explain it. We forget…we just get on with everyday life, we don’t think about it any more. I say to myself: “Everyone else is eating it, so I will too”.
—Does today’s successful result chase away all the danger : “There, our child is no longer contaminated, we can live better”?
—No. We never stop worrying. We think about the children all the time. Especially in winter, when there are fewer vitamins. Over the whole winter the children drank Biophilite, a multivitamin product. I don’t think they are deprived of anything, yoghurt, fruit juice, fruit…
—Yo
u’re in the right profession too, being a nurse. You know more about these things.
—I understand a bit about what it can lead to.
—Amongst your friends, the people you know, have you noticed them taking more care about what the children eat?
—First, it depends if you can afford to buy clean food for the children, to buy them imported food. For example, my sister got herself measured. She had accumulated very high levels of radioactivity, up to 230 Bq. She works at the school. I told her “Buy adsorbents as well”. She replied: “I can’t afford it”. In the end, she also took the tablets and her levels came down to 102 Bq. By more than a half. 139
139 Nesterenko can only afford to distribute pectin freely to children, as the money coming in from foreign NGOs is insufficient for wider distribution.
—The government should distribute them.
—Of course! It should be done as a matter of urgency.
—Why doesn’t it? How do you explain it?
—I don’t know. I’m not the government. If I was at the head of the government I would have made it a priority. Because above all we must protect the children’s health.
4. A POOR FAMILY
Mrs Grits, a young mother, has two children, a boy of 7 and a little girl of 3 who has a glass eye. She is holding her little girl in her arms as she welcomes us.
Q.—What illness does she have?
Mrs Grits.—The scientific term is retinoblastoma. It is a malignant tumour of the eye. She is receiving chemotherapy.
—Is she in pain?
—Yes, a lot. She has lost her hair. After the second chemotherapy session she couldn’t walk. She’s a little better now. We are into the third session now. We need to do three more. There’s no guarantee that she will regain normal health nor that she will live. They say: “No-one can give you that guarantee”. They say that these tumours are unpredictable. It’s terrible. They put poison into the organism. She lies down and can’t get up, it’s so strong. I say: “They could kill her this way”. After the second session, she was in resuscitation for three days. The first day, she was unconscious. She regained consciousness on the second day.
The children have pains everywhere, in their legs, their joints…The adults? They have headaches all the time. There is definitely something going on here. My husband says: “As soon as I do a little work on the tractor, I come back to the house with pains in my head”. He complains about it. But who can you go, to complain when almost everyone feels the same way?
—You too?
—Like most young people. I get the impression that everyone between 20 and 30 is becoming weaker. We have a cousin who works in radiation. He says there is a map showing all the levels of radioactivity. Here, near the hospital, where the road turns, where you came in, there’s a place marked with very high levels of radioactivity. It fell with the rain in different places; there are patches here and there.
—Do you know where to walk and not to walk? Do you know which places are contaminated?
—No, no-one here knows anything. 10 km from here a village was evacuated, but we go there to collect berries and mushrooms, and we eat them. People have got to live, haven’t they?
—You have a choice about what you eat, you can be disciplined and exclude the food that you should not be eating.
—But what choice do we have when salaries are not paid? The last salary I was paid was three months ago. It was 400,000 roubles (the equivalent of 8 dollars).What choice is there? We produce everything. We have a cow, and some pigs, the potatoes are from our vegetable garden, we can’t buy clean potatoes. It’s all ours.
—Do you test the milk to see if it clean?
—They say we can drink it.
—OK, “they say” you can, but have you had it measured?
—No, we haven’t had it measured.
—And the potatoes? Nothing?
—The potatoes haven’t been measured either. It’s clear that all that is radioactive to a certain extent. But the people here have got used to it, and in the end they have to eat something. We would die of hunger if we didn’t eat something.
5. THE ERMAKOVS, A POOR FAMILY
The technique employed by Evgeni Ermakov and his friend Yury to catch fish for their dinner consists of entering the shallow water of the pond up to thigh level and armed with a net stretched out as a barrier in front of the reeds where the fish are hiding, give loud thumps with their feet in the water. The fish are frightened and swim away into the middle of the pond… and finish up on the table. We filmed them from a wooden footbridge over the narrow part of the pond, which divides it in two. In the past this place at the edge of the village was a major route through to Polessie.
Ermakov tells us that Catherine the Great had the road made to link the North of the country with Ukraine. There were six bridges along the route. All that remains are four wooden walkways for the animals to pass through: the road takes a different route now.
His ten year old son, covered from head to foot to keep the mosquitoes off the ecchymoses all over his body, is watching us. The fishermen come out of the water with three little fish, and his father talks to us.
Ermakov.—The boy is an invalid from Chernobyl. He has aplastic anaemia, a disease of the blood. His body is covered in ecchymoses. Blue marks. They wanted to give him a bone marrow transplant. We wanted to be donors, but there was no match. We were given a German medicine that he drank morning and night. He is monitored continually.
Q .—Why do you think he became ill? Was it because he eats radioactive food?
—Of course.
—That you give him?
—No. There is congenital anaemia, which can’t be cured... It can change with age. For example, if I had congenital anaemia at the age of ten, by the age of twelve, it might have disappeared. But his is acquired. And he has a certificate from Chernobyl: “Due to the radioactive contamination of the territory”. Because we live in this area. That’s it. The radiation is too high here.
—Really, and what about your food?
—What food? The cow goes into the wood which is radioactive! I feed the pig? It’s radioactive. I fish… Can I refuse to give him fish? Its radioactive too. I can go to the shop to buy him sausages. And where is the sausage from? It’s all our meat. They accept our animals. What else is there? How else can I feed him? I can’t buy food from Africa every day, pineapples, oranges, so that it’s clean. Besides, I only get paid once every three months. I live on what I have… The vegetable garden, the cow, the pig and I go round in circles. You haven’t got any money? You borrow until you get paid and then you go round in circles. It’s good if you have relatives, like Yury; he has his father, and I’ve got an aunt who is retired. They receive a regular pension. For example, my son gets an invalidity pension. They pay him 400,000 roubles, (8 dollars in 1998). Chernobyl was his punishment, he fell ill, and for that they pay him 400,000. But I have to take him to Minsk every ten days for his treatment and for tests: 100,000 to get there and 100,000 to get back. That’s 200,000. And then, I have to feed him and I have to eat something myself. We go there for three or four days.
His legs were very painful, he could no longer walk because he felt dizzy and because of his legs. Now he is having chemotherapy. At the moment, his condition is normal…within normal limits. They say they may be able to postpone the sessions at some point. We don’t know if it will get worse or what…
—Has your view of the world, of nature, changed?
—That’s an understatement! (He turns to his friend.) Yury, which year was it that we worked together at Kuzmichi on the harvester?
Yury.—1991.
Ermakov.—That village has been buried now.140 But we remember being at Valavsk also, which is 12 km from that area of contamination. The blood ran from our noses, in a real fountain. I was driving the harvester, I had a whistling sound in my head, and
blood pouring from my nose. A little rest on your back and then back to work. After that, perhaps the body gets used to it, little by little. But the first year was very difficult.
140 On the map showing contamination, Kouzmichi is in the middle of an area of contamination with levels between 15–40 Ci/km2, 8 km from Skorodnoie.
—You don’t feel free like you were before?
—We go into the forest to collect mushrooms. Today I go somewhere, get back to the house, and everything is fine. I go somewhere else, come back and I have a fever and a headache. The radioactivity occurs in patches in the forest. Here it’s clean and over there, there is a big patch. And in the evening you don’t feel well: fever and headache. We don’t have a dosimeter. When I go here or there, I don’t know if it’s radioactive or not. All I know is that I was walking in that part of the forest and I feel ill. Take game for example. What happens there? You kill an animal in the forest. The animal is normal. But if it comes from the exclusion zone, 30 km from the reactor, it’s contaminated. They say, and I don’t know if it’s true, that the children of people who hunt game have more radioactivity than the others. The animal arrives here from the zone, they kill it and they eat it. They are more contaminated than we are. We have our son who is ill. Our neighbours, the Grits, have a little girl born without the crystalline lens in the eye, and she also has leukaemia. She’s three years old. This is the situation we are in. This is how we live. We can’t all be evacuated to a clean area. You can’t accommodate all of us, as long as we are in Belarus, to be decontaminated in your areas.
He laughs, lifts his son up onto his shoulders and crosses the shallow water to reach the fields on the opposite bank.
2001
Three years later, in 2001, we pass by Skorodnoie again. We find Ermakov changed. He talks jerkily in sudden outbursts, nervously, then gets blocked, as if he can’t find the right word or can’t articulate it. His mind is perfectly clear and sometimes he looks a bit embarrassed, a bit ashamed of the problem. He almost shouts the words, when they finally come to him. So the three-way conversation we have with him, his wife and his son Kolia is full of eruptions and interruptions. Looking at him, we are suddenly reminded of what Nesterenko said about the effect of caesium-137 on the brain.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 43
