Madam, - Prof William Reville's piece on Chernobyl (Science Today, December 1st) is disturbing on a number of fronts. Firstly, it plays down the medical impact, classifying Chernobyl as a serious accident rather than a disaster, and having the UN's Chernobyl Forum go guarantor to these alleged scientific truths/facts.
Prof Reville writes that, as of mid-2005, fewer than 60 deaths can be directly attributed to radiation. What bunkum! In 1995 I travelled as a doctor to Minsk and Gomel, visited hospitals, orphanages, clinics, talked to physicians, surgeons, paediatricians, saw things with my own eyes and was filmed in what I called the "death wards". These are places in orphanages and clinics where children with congenital birth deformities are left barely attended, with no therapy, to the inevitable outcome - death. I probably saw 60 of those types of cases in that week alone.
As a practising doctor who writes death certificates regularly I am fully aware that the cause of death will not be written down as radiation. Instead a physical classification will appear: leukaemia, hydrocephalus, cardiac valve deformity, etc. So Prof Reville's source statistics are meaningless.What about the estimated 25,000 liquidators who have died since 1986 of various causes linked to radiation exposure, but again are not recorded as such.
If Chernobyl is presented as so much less important than a natural disaster such as the Asian tsunami or the Kashmir earthquake, one must ask who gains by playing it down. One answer is that governments do. In the age of 9/11, terrorists may attack nuclear plants and future Chernobyl-type disasters don't bear thinking about.
Honourable scientists know the reality. Albert Einstein knew that "the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe". - Yours, etc,
PATRICK CROWLEY MB, Kilmoganny Health Centre, Kilmoganny, Co Kilkenny.