[cdn-nucl-l] U.N. Faces Tough Sell on Chornobyl Research

["Adam McLean" <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted in Science Magazine, Volume 298, Number 5594, Issue of 25 Oct
2002, p. 725 and at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/298/5594/725a
Too bad this is what happens when UNSCEAR concludes "there is no
evidence of a major public health impact."

Adam

-------------------

U.N. Faces Tough Sell on Chornobyl Research
Paul Webster*

MOSCOW--The United Nations is mounting a last-ditch effort to
reinvigorate flagging interest in the long-term health consequences of
the Chornobyl disaster. At a meeting of U.N. agencies in New York City
earlier this week, the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) established a new organization, the
International Chernobyl Research Network, to mount a coordinated
research program on the lingering impacts of the world's most serious
nuclear reactor accident. A concerted scientific effort is necessary, it
argues, "if the evidence is not to be lost forever." Prospects for the
new initiative are unclear, however. OCHA itself has no money to launch
new research projects, and expert opinion is split on the network's
scientific potential.

The Chornobyl network is the brainchild of Keith Baverstock, the
European radiation health adviser to the World Health Organization
(WHO). A lack of coordination among international agencies, he says, has
hampered research on the health impacts of the April 1986 explosion at
the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which spewed roughly 200 Hiroshima
bombs' worth of radiation across a region of Eastern Europe inhabited by
2 million people. As a result, he contends, much Chornobyl research has
been unsound.

Baverstock is hoping that governments and international organizations
will commit new funds for the initiative. The network could be modeled
after WHO's effort to coordinate research on the health effects of
electromagnetic fields, a program supported by $150 million in research
commitments from governmental and nongovernmental research programs
worldwide, says Mike Repacholi, coordinator of WHO's Radiation and
Environmental Health Unit.

Partly to help guide the new network, WHO plans a systematic review of
the literature on low-level radiation. WHO has a head start on this
assessment thanks to the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of
Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), which 2 years ago issued a comprehensive
survey of Chornobyl health research. UNSCEAR charged that many studies
suffer from "methodological weaknesses," including spotty diagnoses and
disease classification, poor selection of control groups, and inadequate
radiation-dose estimates. Apart from an increase in mostly treatable
thyroid cancer in children, UNSCEAR concluded, "there is no evidence of
a major public health impact."

The biggest challenge, UNSCEAR warned, is to estimate radiation doses
reliably. Recent studies suggest that doses might have been lower than
originally thought. "A lot of people thought the Soviets were
underestimating the dose," says UNSCEAR scientific secretary Norman
Gentner. "It's turning out the opposite was the case."

The lowered dose estimates suggest that any lingering health effects
apart from thyroid cancer, if they exist, will be hard to detect. But
that doesn't mean researchers shouldn't try, says Dillwyn Williams, a
thyroid cancer expert at the University of Cambridge, U.K. "I do believe
that there are large uncovered areas of research," he says. Priority
areas, he adds, should be new case-control studies on breast and lung
cancer and genetic effects, under the umbrella of a comprehensive
long-term population study.

Few Chornobyl researchers anticipate undiscovered health effects. "It
appears unlikely that excess for solid cancers can be seen and can be
related to radiation exposure," says Albrecht Kellerer, director of the
University of Munich's Radiobiology Institute, who has been involved in
a decade-long German-French project on Chornobyl. But he's keeping an
open mind on blood cancers. "Even if there is little expectation to find
a radiation effect," Kellerer says, it would be worthwhile to monitor
childhood leukemia--and to continue surveillance on thyroid
cancer--among the roughly 200,000 people living in
Chornobyl-contaminated areas.

Kellerer believes, however, that the hunt for knowledge about the health
risks from long-term exposure to low-dose radiation could be pursued
more fruitfully elsewhere. His group has won support from the European
Commission to move its focus from Chornobyl to the region around the
Mayak nuclear facility in the southern Urals of Russia, where extensive
radioactive contamination in the surrounding watershed came to light
after the Cold War. Mayak, he says, has opened "a vast new chapter of
radiation epidemiology."

Such views don't augur well for the U.N.'s fundraising effort, which
began this week with discussions aimed at generating research
commitments within U.N. agencies and will continue at a follow-up
meeting next month. As well as generating funding commitments from
outside the U.N., the aim of the entire effort is to arrive at a
consensus on "what research exists and what's needed," says David
Chikvaidze, Chornobyl coordinator for OCHA in New York City. Judging by
researchers' increasing ambivalence about their chances to make
breakthroughs with Chornobyl data, the U.N. might need to set modest
expectations.

Volume 298, Number 5594, Issue of 25 Oct 2002, p. 725. 
Copyright C 2002 by The American Association for the Advancement of
Science. All rights reserved.