How many more lives will Chernobyl claim

How many more lives will Chernobyl claim? - News | Print | New Scientist HOME

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025464.400-how-many-more-lives-will-chernobyl-claim.html

Click to PrintHow many more lives will Chernobyl claim?

06 April 2006

From New Scientist Print Edition

Rob Edwards

THE cloud of radiation spewed out by the world's worst nuclear accident at

Chernobyl 20 years ago could kill up to 60,000 people - 15 times as many as

officially estimated. So say scientists who are accusing two UN organisations,

the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organization

(WHO), of downplaying the impact of the accident.

Chernobyl reactor number 4 in Ukraine was ripped apart by an explosion on 26

April 1986, and burned for 10 days. It disgorged a massive amount of

radioactivity - up to 14 exabecquerels (14 × 1018 becquerels) - over Europe and

the rest of the world.

Last September, the IAEA and the WHO released a report which claimed to reveal

"the true scale of the accident". Its headline conclusion that radiation from

the accident would kill a total of 4000 people was widely reported (New

Scientist, 10 September 2005, p 14), but that figure is now being challenged. In

a report this week for the Green group in the European Parliament, Ian Fairlie

and David Sumner, two independent radiation scientists from the UK, say that the

death toll from cancers caused by Chernobyl will in fact lie somewhere between

30,000 and 60,000.

They accuse the IAEA/WHO report of ignoring its own prediction of an extra 5000

cancer deaths in the less contaminated parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and

of failing to take account of many thousands more deaths in other countries,

where more than half of Chernobyl's fallout ended up. "It is poor scientific

practice to issue figures which only reflect part of the real situation,"

Fairlie says.

Zhanat Carr, a radiation scientist with the WHO in Geneva, says the 5000 deaths

were omitted because the report was a "political communication tool".

"Scientifically, it may not be the best approach," she admitted to New

Scientist. She also accepts that the WHO estimates did not include predicted

cancers outside Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The health impact in other

countries will be "negligible", she says, adding that there is no

epidemiological research showing otherwise. The WHO "has no reasons to

deliberately mislead anyone", she insists. "WHO's position is independent, free

from political issues, and based on scientific evidence of the highest quality."

The IAEA refused to comment.

Fairlie and Sumner's accusations are backed by other experts. The IAEA/WHO

report "misrepresents reality by significantly underestimating the number of

cancer deaths", says Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina in

Columbia. A paper co-authored by Mousseau and published this week in Trends in

Ecology and Evolution (DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2006.01.008) points to studies

suggesting that fallout from Chernobyl has already caused germline mutations in

animals and plants.

Elizabeth Cardis, a radiation specialist from the WHO's International Agency for

Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, says that 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths is

"the right order of magnitude". She is due to publish a study later this month

that will estimate the number of excess cancers attributable to Chernobyl

amongst 570 million Europeans. Though they will be difficult to detect, as they

will only form a tiny proportion of the millions of cancer deaths from all

causes, this doesn't mean that they should be ignored, Cardis says. "They are

real people who suffer from the accident."

Printed on Mon Apr 10 19:31:19 BST 2006