MONDAY, Sept. 5, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Almost 20 years after the worst nuclear accident in history, a massive report by an international team of scientists, economists and health experts finds that the legacy of Chernobyl is terrible, but not as terrible as once predicted.
The report released Monday concludes that up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure, many of them the on-site staff and emergency workers called to deal with the 1986 catastrophe at the nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. But as drastic as that sounds, initial predictions speculated that the death toll would climb into the tens of thousands.
It also found that most of the five million people living in contaminated areas received doses of radiation within acceptable limits when the No. 4 reactor exploded, spreading a radioactive cloud over much of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and parts of Western Europe, killing 30 people and forcing the evacuation and relocation of 350,000 more.
And while there are also economic, environmental and psychological effects, the overall toll seems not to be as devastating as once predicted: As of mid-2005, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, mostly workers, but also 15 children, nine of whom died of thyroid cancer.
"Clearly, it is the most horrific nuclear accident in history, and there's no getting around that," said Dr. Fred Mettler, Jr., chairman of one of the three expert groups involved in putting the report together and a radiologist at Albuquerque Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New Mexico. "[But] it is not something that is so devastating that it can't be managed, and this report points out is that the situation is manageable."
The 600-page report, called Chernobyl's Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts, was a mammoth undertaking by hundreds of experts in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia as well as eight United Nations agencies. Members of the forum, including representatives of the three governments, will meet Tuesday and Wednesday in Vienna to discuss the findings.
"To get eight U.N. agencies with completely different missions and three governments to get a consensus on something was astounding," said Mettler, who made 22 trips to all three countries, escorting teams of 20 doctors at a time, over the course of a year.
The report does, ultimately, provide data on an area where there is a sore lack of information.
"If one is trying to get any possible good out of this, it may be possible to get some additional data about the effects of radiation on exposed populations," said G. Donald Frey, a medical physicist in the department of radiology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. "This is a much larger population than anything we've had to deal with in the past other than the Japanese A-bomb survivors."
Here are some additional findings from the report:
And here are some of the report's key recommendations:
"Hopefully, if we can get all these pieces to the people and do it right, we can reduce the impact," Mettler said. "I don't think it will every go away."
More information
This site gives more information on the causes and immediate results of the Chernobyl disaster.