Grim Fallout from Chernobyl

One of the most disturbing predictions following the near meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, was that cancer cases would eventually begin to rise in areas affected by fallout from the accident. What no one suspected was that it would happen so soon, or that many of the first victims would be children. Two reports in Nature, one by the World Health Organization and one by health officials in Belarus, the ex-Soviet republic that was immediately downwind from Chernobyl on that fateful day, indicate that childhood thyroid cancer has skyrocketed from an average of four cases a year to about 60. Most severely affected was the Gomel region, hit first by the radiation: the thyroid cancer rate there is now about 80 times the world average. "The only reasonable explanation," write the Belarus officials, "is that it is a direct consequence of the accident at Chernobyl."

In retrospect, the phenomenon makes sense: the thyroid gland tends to concentrate iodine ingested by the body, and radioactive iodine was released in bulk during the accident. Moreover, radiation is known to cause thyroid cancer, and children are especially susceptible. But previous studies of nuclear accidents in Britain and the U.S. and studies of nuclear-weapons testing in Japan and the South Pacific have failed to prove a fallout-cancer correlation conclusively. The probable difference this time: the radiation was more highly concentrated and hit a heavily populated area.