"Chernobyl is Tatyana. Tatyana is Chernobyl": a 12 year old patient in a Belarussian hospital describes her existence.
AS veterans of great catastrophes already know, the Western world is in the habit of holding out for suitably harrowing pictures of distraught mothers weeping over tiny, dead bodies before opening its hearts and cheque books. These images exist in Belarus, of course - but not in sufficient quantity, it seems, to induce UN member governments - to offer meaningful aid, nor to persuade the pro nuclear lobby that enormous plumes of radiation can seriously damage your health.
The Belarussian people and their children, to their cost, failed to supply the international community with something suitably apocalyptic after Chernobyl; something, ideally, with short term "results"; something - naturally - that conformed to current scientific dogma. A good, quick leukaemia epidemic would have done nicely.
But their mortality figures have not been startling and the mundanity of their suffering and despair is unspectacular for televisual purposes. So governments could relax and keep their money - and so, to its intense relief, could the nuclear power industry.
In the nuclear power business, good PR is everything. This was the accident that could never happen; the less said the better. And so the official figure for deaths from the disaster - 31 (of which 28 were due to radiation sickness) - has been steadfastly maintained since the summer of 1986, despite numerous other documented deaths. This fiction was sustained and encouraged through the good offices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which sponsored its own investigation into the health of the affected population. Its 1991 report, "The International Chernobyl Project" (ICP), produced really excellent news for the industry the agency had been set up to monitor; there was plenty of ill health, to be sure, but none, astoundingly, that could be traced to Chernobyl's door.
Then slowly, agonisingly slowly, the truth of Chernobyl began to assert itself. As Belarussian doctors noted and struggled to cope with the alarming rise in cases of an extremely rare and aggressive childhood thyroid cancer, a trio of British scientists started to listen to their Eastern colleagues. Unfazed by the hostility and overt scepticism of their Western counterparts, they travelled to Belarus to see for themselves. They were shattered by what they saw. And so began the long, hard, unfashionable struggle for recognition of a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.
Back then, Valentina was not even dimly aware of the squabbling among scientists. She had enough problems. Even while the ICP was giving Chernobyl the all clear and the nuclear power industry was getting back to business as usual, her seven year old daughter Olga was about to undergo her first thyroid operation in Minsk's No 1 hospital. Since then she has undergone a second operation, followed by four courses of radiotherapy.
Olga is 12 now but her prognosis remains uncertain. She has two official documents bearing her photograph, certifying baldly what she is today: 1) an invalid and 2) a child of Chernobyl. But she hardly needs certificates; the high collar she wears is the clue. Under it, she carries the unsightly ear to ear scar of the so called "Belarussian necklace", the unmistakable stamp of thyroid surgery. She will be dependent on the synthetic hormone, Thyroxine, all her life and will need to be monitored to the end of her days. Nearly two thirds of these young victims are girls.
Galvanised by grief and Olga's suffering, aware that there were many more like her. Valentina set up the Children in Danger organisation in Gomel, the region in south west Belarus whose benighted children now fill the unfragrant, over crowded wards in Minsk's No 1 hospital and the dingy, severely under resourced Gomel Regional. At least, she says, Olga is able to walk. Her organisation for children with cancer of any kind - includes families with two or more small victims, some of whom are unable to get out of bed. Mothers attempting to cope with this, and at the same time hold down jobs in a climate of dreadful economic hardship, are worn out. Marriages are breaking asunder under the strain. Ominously, her own second daughter Olga's twin sister has developed breathing difficulties and chronic tiredness.
She looks very pale, says Valentina. These, she says biting her lip, are classic signs of thyroid problems.
"Our hearts are becoming harder and harder - like stone," she says. "But we are alive."
Valentina hastle children on her books at the moment. But in the opinion of Dillwyn Williams, professor of histopathology at Cambridge and one of the original trio of British scientists who actually listened to the Belarussians, this is only the beginning. He believes that as many as 40 per cent of the children exposed to the highest levels of fall out from Chernobyl when they were under a year old, could got on to develop thyroid cancer as adults. A World Health Organisation study suggests that in the infant group aged up to three years at that time in the most contaminated areas, up to 25 per cent can be expected to develop thyroid cancer. One in four or five, instead of one in a million: Chernobyl has planted a time bomb.
FEW in the scientific community are now prepared to argue with these figures. But then again, thyroid cancer is the one irrefutable health fall out of Chernobyl. Its previous rarity, the concentration of radio iodine in the plume above severely hit areas such as Gomel, the ages of the small victims, make the link a reasonable certainty, pace those in the IAEA who continue to reserve judgment until they get sight of "the full set of data" whenever that might be.
The final twist in this nuclear nightmare came in recent weeks when the American scientist responsible for the 1991 ICP report, Dr Fred Mettler, admitted that he had found an abnormal number of thyroid cancers - at least 20 - as far back as 1990. This finding featured nowhere in his report. As a result, said WHO radiation expert Dr Keith Baverstock, "time was lost and possibly lives will be lost". But Dr Mettler is still holding out - this time for a map of the plume to see if it was actually there when tiny children breathed in a thousand times their normal dose of natural iodine and planted a time bomb for an entire generation.