Toll From Chernobyl Is Still Rising

Fourteen years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl power plant is still killing people, Ukraine’s Health Ministry said Friday.

About 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 No. 4 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 later that the accident had killed 31 people and affected thousands more.

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 thought.

Official data show that the health of about 3.5 million people, including 1.26 million children, was affected in this impoverished nation of 50 million.

Children as well as 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% per 1,000, compared with a national average of 14.8%.

Bobyleva said high radiation had led to an outbreak of diseases of the nervous, blood and respiratory systems.

She said the rate of these diseases among children affected by the accident was 17% 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 is particularly worried by an increase in deaths of emergency workers, popularly called “liquidators,” most of whom are younger than 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 poses another danger to public health.

A lack of funds 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 that it will close Chernobyl’s last operational reactor by the end of the year.