Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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people just haven't complained about. So the base of data is an
issue.
I think it's extremely unfortunate that this reactor happens to
sit on the border of three republics. What we saw when we were
there was not sharing of data between republics. They all were
doing things with different methodologies, so that a study performed
in the Ukraine was being done with methodology that was
different in Byelorussia and different in Russia, so you couldn't
easily compare results. So there is a need for standardized ways of
doing things so you can at least get comparable results.
The fact that this thing is sitting on three administrative boundaries
is still causing trouble. I think you've heard a suggestion
today for a Ukrainian-American Medical Center. I can assure you
the Byelorussians would want one as well, and in fact, there are
more exposed people in Byelorussia probably.
I think we have to get away sort of from the nationalistic aspects
of it and deal with the accident itself. That is proving to be quite
difficult. I know that the current efforts by the United States are
hampered by having to try and form one agreement with people in
Minsk and a different agreement under different circumstances to
study the thyroid in Kiev and a different agreement with the Russians.
It is clear at this point, and I agree with the speaker and we
pointed this out ourselves, that acute effects in the population that
we looked at were not likely from the doses that we had expected.
Acute effects are clearly in these other populations. Studying them
is going to be a huge, major task and in fact probably an impossible
task, and that's one of the reasons in our recommendations that we
said let's find the people with the biggest doses and the ones at
most risk and study them. That goes against much of the philosophy
of this region where everybody should have everything equally,
and it's a difficult problem when you say, "I want to study this
group," and they say, "No, no, no, you have to study all 300,000
people," and you just don't have the resources or the expertise to
do that. So there's a problem between studying the people who got
the higher doses and this philosophy of everybody ought to have
the same thing, and I don't know how to solve that problem.
It is clear, as has been pointed out I think by everybody, that the
long-term effects are not generally specific to radiation. They will
be hard to sort out. When a child gets leukemia, is it a child who is
from a relatively clean area? Is it one who was from a contaminated
area? As you can see, when you get an inhomogeneous distribution
like that, when you start reporting data by oblast or state, you
get a mixture of some 75 percent of the people may not have received
much contamination and the other 25 percent might have,
and your data is all mixed up. You need to sort the data out by
contaminated areas versus noncontaminated as opposed to collecting
it by state, if you will.
I think there is a residual major problem at this point, and that
is coordination of what is to be done. I think there are a lot of
things that need to be done—education, equipment, general medical
problems. However, there are bilateral agreements which were
in place before the independence of these republics. There were bilateral
agreements between the Japanese government and the So-