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village within the zone. The evacuated region, which some optimists have spoken of as salvageable even for agriculture, is already a depository for nuclear waste, and there are plans afoot to build a reprocessing factory. The next day, I was taken to the Center for Radia tion Medicine in a pleasantly wooded district of north east Kiev, at my own request, and had a long and detailed meeting with the scientists and radiation spe cialists there. The Center, and especially its Institute of Clinical Radiology, is about as popular in Kiev as the Palace of Culture built by Stalin in the center of War saw. It is accused of excessive secrecy about Cher nobyl, of concealing the number of official deaths and especially providing misleading diagnoses of those who are sick today, which includes some 200,000 former cleanup workers. Our host was Professor Oles Pyatak, Deputy Direc tor and a winner of the Ukrainian State Prize, but most question were answered by a somber radiation special ist called Dr. I. Los. I was accompanied by Valery once again, who would always add his comments after each interview. He was, I surmised, a sort of policeman, ame nable, but rigid in his views, and clearly assigned to me for my entire stay in Ukraine. I wasted no time on for malities at this meeting and waded into the topic of Narodichi and the recent reports about widespread illnesses. The medical specialists provided a variety of expla nations to counter the prevailing views. Time and again, I was informed that these “people” (Shcherbak and oth ers, though Shcherbak is a medical doctor by training!) were not ’’experts.” Some were well-intentioned, but did not know the real story. In Narodichi region, there has always been a deficiency of iodine, I was told, so that thyroid disorders in children have been common there since the 1940s. The real problem today, in the view of Dr. Los, is radiophobia, the unhealthy and, in his view, unwarranted fear of radiation that has permeated set tlements well away from the disaster region. I was given a tour of the Center. Former firemen and cleanup workers were much in evidence, some with extensive burns. I entered the ward of one former opera tor and a fireman. The operator, Symonenko, seemed still dazed when asked about the explosion on April 26, 1986, remembering only the initial bang. The fireman, Pryshchepa, was too sick to speak much, saying only that he has never worked since that time. His pallor was alarming. I felt physically ill myself when I left their room to be shown the grounds and the monuments placed there by various specialists from the IDEA and nuclear organizations. I was now more curious than ever to attain some sort of perspective on the fallout question and thus sought out people who had been to Narodichi or had been in the Chernobyl region in the first months. One was Eduard Pershyn, a reporter for the weekly news paper “Literary Ukraine”, which, despite its rather intel lectual title, has been conducting investigations into nuclear power in the republic since the 1970s. Pershyn confirmed a fact that I had feared must be the case. In June 1989, he had taken a geiger counter into the woods around Narodichi and discovered that the read ings there were higher that at Chernobyl itself. How was this possible? There remain several possi ble explanations. The wind may have carried hotspots of strontium, cesium, plutonium and other isotopes great distances. The airplanes that dispersed the initial ra dioactive cloud over Chernobyl may have pushed this cloud precisely over the Zhitomir province, in which Narodichi is located. The rainfall in the first days after the explosion may have been responsible. Whatever the case, for nearly three years, no one had bothered to look into the situation in the villages west of the zone. During these three years, it was confirmed, people had drunk contaminated water, had produced harvests of irradiated goods, and even distributed them across the Soviet Union. After the diaster, all efforts had been on the small thirty kilometer zone that was evacuated. But even there, the monitoring of health problems was, to say the least, peripheral. There are no records, for example, of any of the thousands of military reservists sent to decontami nate the area in 1986. Most of those who suffered from high radiation levels, a Kiev journalist called Lyubov Kovalevska discovered, are not listed on the register at the Center for Radiation Medicine. At the Center itself, a recent survey showed that 399 out of 400 patients have no faith or belief in the doctors who are treating them. In February 1990, eighteen patients there went on hunger strike demanding that their illnesses be declared radiation related so that they can receive proper com pensation. It has also been noted by the Ukrainian Par liament that although some 200,000 people who took part in decontamination crews have become ill subse quently, in not a single case has their illness officially been related to radiation. Kovalevs’ka has pointed out that many suffered from hair and teeth loss, restless ness, general fatigue and other symptoms that can be related to exposure to high radiation levels. Unofficial groups in Kiev have begun to publish some of the statistics on illnesses in their own news papers. One journal, which is released by the deputies to the Soviet Congress from the city, indicated that in regions such as Narodichi and Korosten (a city of 75,000, also in Zhitomir province), the number of tumors, dis eases of the blood and bronchial problems has risen by 500-600 percent since the Chernobyl disaster, and especially in 1988-89. Thus I came to recognize that the tragedy of Cher nobyl is much greater than I had anticipated. In Ukraine and Belorussia in particular, the effects have been debil itating. In November 1989, Anatoly Romanenko, the Director of the Center for Radiation Medicine, lost his job as Ukrainian Health Minister. It was Romanenko who had failed to provide a health warning to the popu lation of Kiev and Kiev province for ten days afterward. 24 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, КВІТЕНЬ 1990 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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