Ukrainian victims of radioactive food

The legacy of Chernobyl: Zombie reactors and an invisible enemy  ABC News,  Foreign Correspondent  By Europe correspondent Linton Besser, Mark Doman, Alex Palmer and Nathanael Scott, 3 Sep 2019

“…………… Victims of contaminated food

While there are areas close to the crippled reactor which are perfectly safe, throughout vast stretches of the north-west of the country, many kilometres away, Ukrainians are still grappling with the legacy of the Chernobyl eruption.

The Australian Government’s official travel advice for this region warns tourists not to eat dairy, game, fruits or vegetables “unless they are imported”.

But in a country as poor as Ukraine, where many still subsist on what they can grow themselves, that’s a luxury few can afford.A study of 14 villages in Rivne — a province 200km west of the reactor — found radioactive milk at more than 12 times the safe level for children. That study was conducted between 2011 and 2016 and published last year, 32 years after the explosion.  [PITURE HERE]

Kristina’s condition is carefully monitored at the Institute of Specialised Radiation Protection on the outskirts of Kiev. The facility was established just months after the accident, and it is still taking on hundreds of new patients every year. All of them are children.

“[They] do not understand what Chernobyl was, the kind of catastrophe [it was],” the institute’s chief nurse, Nataliya Moshko, said. Often, the children do not believe they are sick at all.Still, it’s better than it was. When she first began in nursing, Nataliya was caring for children diagnosed with terminal cancer, “because of the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster”.

Now long dead, she insisted, “I remember every one”.

The legacy of the accident endures. As of January, of the 2.1 million people registered with Ukraine’s health authorities for treatment for Chernobyl-related illnesses, 350,000 were children.

“The problem is that the Chernobyl disaster with its consequences was not solved very quickly at that time,” Nataliya said. “And now these vast territories of Ukraine, and many, many thousands of people are contaminated.”The children spend weeks in the hospital to receive treatment, but also to be fed a clean diet. If and when their symptoms ease, and they’re discharged, they return home to the same contaminated environment which made them ill in the first place.

Food markets across the country are required to test local produce for the two isotopes which persist in the environment — Strontium-90 and Caesium-137.

Berries, mushrooms and milk contaminated by radiation are meant to be discarded, but reports abound of radioactive berries being merely discounted instead.On a visit to a testing laboratory attached to one large fresh produce hall in Kiev, officials take great care in demonstrating the rigour with which they test for Caesium-137.

But when asked how they went about checking for the Strontium isotope, they shrug their shoulders; there’s no money for the equipment needed to do so……… https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-03/chernobyls-radioactive-legacy-zombie-reactors-an-invisible-enemy/11432430

September 3, 2019 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized