Kiev - Fourteen years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl power plant is still reaping a harvest of deaths, Ukraine's Health Ministry said yesterday.
About 3.5 million people, over a third of them children, have suffered illness as a result of the contamination and the incidence of some cancers is 10 times the national average.
"The health of people affected by the Chernobyl accident is getting worse and worse every year," the Deputy Health Minister, Mr Olha Bobyleva, said. Chernobyl's number four reactor exploded in the early hours of April 26th, 1986, spreading a poisonous radioactive cloud over much of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and parts of Western Europe.