Madam, - In recent months The Irish Times has carried part of the debate that followed the release of the International Atomic Energy Agency report on the Chernobyl disaster. The IAEA found that fewer than 60 people had died.
Understandably, those who raised hundreds of millions of euro and worked for 20 years to help the victims of Chernobyl, notably the Cork-based charity headed by Adi Roche, were incensed. Writing in The Irish Times on January 19th, Prof William Reville implied that he had received an amount of personal criticism as a result of defending the report.
To an extent I can sympathise. In 1996 I published an account of the then known research on Chernobyl in the Catholic newspaper The Pilgrim. At the time I and The Pilgrim also experienced considerable criticism.
The review was based on a series of conferences held in the spring of 1996 in St Petersburg, Minsk and Obinsk, which illustrated that the debate between the aid workers and scientists was, even then in 1996, missing the point.
In summary, the conferences named three groups severely affected by the disaster. Firstly: those who worked in the reactor complex and those children who developed thyroid cancer. Of these 60 have died. Secondly, the CIBA conference in St Petersburg estimated that more than 350,000 people were evacuated. The Soviet authorities and their Western advisers were in possession of sufficient knowledge to know that the effects on these people would be negligible and that the increase in mortality anticipated in moving so large a group of people would be between 2 and 10 per cent.
The CIBA conference estimated that the evacuation caused 20,000 deaths and immense suffering. It is this group of people who benefited most from the work of the Chernobyl charities. They were, however, not victims of radiation but of scientific and medical negligence.
The third and largest group did not even known what had happened. Prof Annigo Signa, an Italian radiation expert, told the Minsk conference that an estimated 50,000 Italian women had abortions in the summer of 1996 because they believed or were advised that they were at risk of having deformed babies. Dr Signa said that this trend would have been more pronounced in places closer to the fallout (Russia, Poland, Slovakia and Bavaria) and he estimated that false assumptions concerning radiation caused up to 500,000 abortions in total.
As a parent of six adopted, disabled East European children (all born within two years of Chernobyl), and as someone who has spent his adult life in the company of disabled people, I find the idea of aborting a child because it might be disabled repugnant. Half-a-million such abortions is horrific.
Doctors knew since the publication of research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that there was no evidence that the kind of exposure caused by Chernobyl would cause an increase in malformations and the IAEA report has again confirmed this.
The many disabled children brought to Ireland and elsewhere from Belarus by the Chernobyl Charities benefited enormously, but they were not victims of Chernobyl. In a way they benefited from it.
In 1996 the Irish Department of the Environment was considering a response to a possible accident at the nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria. Evacuating an area 50 miles north and south of Dundalk was being considered. Such an action would have been disastrous and totally unnecessary.
Scientists must take responsibility to inform as well as research, otherwise we will repeat the mass evacuations and mass abortions somewhere in the world over the next 20 years. If we do, as in Chernobyl, the nuclear industry will have to take its share of the blame but the bulk of it will lie with the scientific and medical community. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT O'LEARY, MB,BCh,BAO,MRC Psych, Antwerp, Belgium.