Children Become the First Victims of Fallout

摘要

PARIS—When pediainc endocrinologist Larisa Astakhova presented her findings at a scientific meeting in Munich in October 1991, Western scientists were, at best, skeptical. Astakhova, then at the Radiation Medicine Institute in Minsk, Belarus, described a dramatic increase in thyroid cancer among the children of her newly independent nation. She said half the new cases, which had begun to appear the previous year, were concentrated in the region of Gomel, north of Chernobyl. The implication was omino