Captain Vasyl Kavatsiuk had been married just two weeks in April 1986, when he received orders for an unusual deployment. It was a beautiful spring morning as his army reserve unit drove to Chornobyl through the villages of Irpin and Vorzel. The picturesque countryside and the balmy weather were a perfect match for the young captain’s post-honeymoon euphoria.
But nothing could have prepared Vasyl Kavatsiuk and his brigade for what awaited them in Chornobyl. Toiling among thousands of emergency workers, breathing vapors and dust coated with radioactive particles, they worked at breakneck speed to build the sarcophagus around the ruined atomic reactor. Many became violently ill with radiation sickness. Kavatsiuk himself was evacuated to Moscow, where he underwent intensive rehabilitation.
When he returned to Ukraine, Kavatsiuk was determined to bring his life back to normal. His wife gave birth to a little girl, Marta, in 1987, but the child was sickly, and after a more thorough blood screening, she was found to have leukemia. In the late 1980s, virtually no hospital in Ukraine had the technology to treat the disease effectively. After Marta died, the Kavatsiuks had another baby, Maria, who also developed a blood disorder that had the telltale signs of the same pre-leukemic condition they had seen in Marta.
In the spring of 1990, the Kavatsiuks met with an American physician, Dr. Zenon Matkiwsky, who had launched a campaign to aid the Chornobyl survivors and their children. Vasyl choked back tears as he begged Matkiwsky to save his second child by bringing her to the United States. After a difficult struggle to obtain a Soviet exit visa, Matkiwsky brought six-month-old Maria to the U.S. where she recovered fully.
Today, Vasyl Kavatsiuk is a successful businessman and realtor in New Jersey. He does not conform to the stereotype promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has sought to depict Chornobyl liquidators as despondent hypochondriacs full of self-pity and inertia. He conducts a church choir and runs several small businesses. The Kavatsiuks have had another baby, and Maria has grown into a statuesque 16-year-old beauty who excels in school and has become an accomplished ballerina and vocalist.
Earlier this month, Kavatsiuk and his daughter attended a press conference at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington announcing the launch of a medical airlift to mark the 20th Anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster. This was the 32nd airlift organized by the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund, the organization founded by Dr. Matkiwsky and his wife Nadia. Kavatsiuk thanked the Matkiwskys for saving Maria’s life, and reminded the audience that there were thousands of liquidators and their children who remained in Ukraine and who are still at risk for developing latent cancers.
In September of 2005, a panel of Chornobyl experts affiliated with the United Nations, the IAEA and the World Health Organization issued a much publicized report that downplayed the health impact of the Chornobyl accident. The so-called Chornobyl Forum claimed that only 54 people had died, and estimated that only 4,000 excess cancer deaths would occur as a result of radiation exposure. It also announced that no genetic damage, no cardio-vascular illnesses, no immune deficiencies and no additional childhood leukemia could be linked to the disaster.
For those of us who work on a daily basis with Ukrainian hospitals and orphanages, the rhetoric of the Chornobyl report sounded suspiciously familiar. Its lead author, Dr. Fred Mettler, was the same IAEA spokesman who in 1992 testified that there was no increase in thyroid cancer. In fact, thyroid cancer among Belarusian children had already skyrocketed to levels 80 times higher than normal. The IAEA now admits that it was wrong in overlooking the thyroid cancer epidemic, but insists that no other health effects have been, or will be detected. Once again, we are told that “radiophobia” and hysteria are the greatest threats to the health of the Chornobyl survivors.
New health studies show otherwise.
First, it is worth examining the actual death toll of the Chornobyl liquidators. According to Dr. Mykola Omelyanets, a leading demographer with the Institute of Radiation Medicine in Kyiv, of the 344,000 Ukrainian liquidators who took part in the Chornobyl emergency clean-up, 10 percent, or 34,400 had died by 2004. Most of these were young men in their 20s and 30s at the time of the accident, and they are dying at a rate 2.7 times higher than working-age men across Ukraine. Even more noteworthy is the fact that 25 percent of these deaths were caused by cancer, while the rate of cancer deaths among the average Ukrainian males in the same age range is only 9.6 percent, an almost three-fold (2.7) difference. These excess cancer deaths would account for 8,600 liquidators – already twice the death toll estimated by the Forum. And this data does not include the cancer impact on liquidators from other ex-Soviet republics, evacuees, or people still living in contaminated territories. It also does not count liquidators who had died prior to 1989.
A parallel study by Israeli and Ukrainian scientists published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in Britain found that the children of Chornobyl liquidators suffer from a seven-fold increase in chromosome damage as compared to their siblings born prior to the accident.
There are many other congenital malformations that have been documented by Belarusian and Ukrainian, Japanese and Italian scientists whose studies have been ignored by the IAEA: Abnormally high rates of cleft palates, polydactilism (extra fingers or toes), deformed or missing limbs, stunted torsos, cataracts, and missing or deformed internal organs.
Several peer-reviewed studies have also found substantially higher rates of pregnancy complications among women living in contaminated villages compared with women from clean zones.
The latency period for many forms of cancer begins to toll after 20 years, and the half-life of radioactive cesium and strontium is 30 years, so we may witness the greatest surge in cancers in the next decade. More than 9,000 children and young adults have been diagnosed with pre-cancerous thyroid lesions. In any case, it is very premature to close the book on Chornobyl’s consequences at this stage.
Little Marta Kavatsiuk will never be counted among the 54 deaths that the Chornobyl Forum and the International Atomic Energy Agency so grudgingly attribute to the Chornobyl disaster. Yet a study commissioned by the U.S. Office of Naval Research found that Ukrainian children in Zhytomyr and Rivne regions had twice the rate of acute lymphoblastic leukemia as children in areas that were spared Chornobyl fallout.
At a minimum, the international community can help provide Ukrainian hospitals with the technology and training they need to combat life-threatening illnesses. At our partner hospitals in Lviv and Lutsk, Chernihiv and Poltava, we have seen how even modest infusions of technology can dramatically reduce infant mortality and improve cancer recovery rates. Since the early 1990s, we have seen how leukemia remission rates have climbed from a dismal 5 percent to 75 percent at one children’s cancer center in Kharkiv.
For the liquidators who risked their lives to protect the rest of the world from Chornobyl’s radiation, the least we can do is to restore their hope and provide their children with a fighting chance for recovery and a better life.
Alexander B. Kuzma is Executive Director of the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund. Since 1990, CCRDF has delivered over $55 million worth of aid to Ukrainian hospitals and orphanages.
