Health Effects in a Casual Sample of Immigrants to Israel from Areas Contaminated by the Chernobyl Explosion (original) (raw)

Health effects in connection with the Chernobyl explosion, which occurred 26 April 1986, are of widespread concern in Israel because about 100,000 people immigrated into the country from possibly contaminated zones between 1990 and 1993. Nonmalignant health disorders associated with Chernobyl exposure have been reported in populations from many regions of Byelorus, Ukraine, and Russia. Health problems are especially prominent among people who were deliberately exposed due to their involvement in cleanup work after the disaster (1-3). These clean-up workers are called "liquidators" because they participated in liquidating the sequelae of the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster. A major problem in the study of such environmental contamination is that valid and reliable measurements of exposure are not generally available (4). Most of our subjects had undergone measurements of the body burden of cesium-137, using a portable, whole-body counter, in the autumn of 1991 provided to us by the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare. This same isotope (137Cs) was the basis for mapping ground-level contamination by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (5) and Russian authorities. This map allowed us to classify the probable exposure of individuals according to the places they lived after the disaster, which is usually the place from which they emigrated. We thus defined two groups with different exposures to long-term Chernobyl radiation to determine if certain health effects differed between these groups. A third group, liquidators or salvage personnel, was presumed to be deliberately exposed to radiation in connection with their work assignments, and thus were subject to higher external and internal exposure, albeit to different isotopes and over different time periods, than the other two groups.