April 12, 1996. Copyright, 1996, Graphic News. All rights reserved

THYROID CANCER SOARS AFTER CHERNOBYL
By Laura Spinney, Science Editor

LONDON, April 12, Graphic News - The rash of thyroid cancers that has spread among children in the former Soviet Union since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster mirrors the pattern of radioactive fallout and was almost certainly caused by absorption of radioactive iodine, say scientists at an international conference in Vienna this week.
The areas most affected by the Chernobyl fallout Ð northern Ukraine, where the nuclear plant is situated, and southern Belarus Ð have seen the biggest increases in rates of thyroid cancer since the accident. The Gomel region of Belarus, for example, has seen around 100 cases per million children annually. Before Chernobyl, Gomel had the same incidence of this rare disease as Britain Ð only 0.5 cases per million children each year.
According to a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which co-sponsored the Vienna conference with the World Health Organisation and the European Commission, the deadly dose of radioiodine affected infants still in their mother's womb and up to the age of three at the time of the accident. Radioiodine is unstable and decays with a half-life of only eight days, so the damage was probably done in the few weeks following the explosion.
The type of thyroid cancer that almost all the children are suffering from attacks the muscles around the thyroid gland and is known to be radiation-related. It can also be treated relatively easily through surgery, unless there are complications. And there is some evidence that the epidemic has reached its peak. ÔThe incidence is still going up, but not so rapidly,Õ says Dr Gerardi Souchkevitch, a radiation scientist at the World Health Organisation in Geneva. However, in a letter to the ÔBritish Medical JournalÕ last month, he and four colleagues warned that 2.3 million children could have been exposed to fallout and are at risk of developing thyroid cancer in the decades to come.