Several thousand children have been given the food additive, and this has decreased the burden of caesium-137 in their bodies by 40–80%. Your assessment of the effectiveness of using this pectin-based product as “a simplistic approach” is surprising. The HRS is an excellent machine for evaluating the effectiveness of different food additives in the diet.
It is no coincidence that in all the sanatoriums in Ukraine, or in places where children from the Chernobyl area are sent for periods of rehabilitation, Human Radiation Spectrometers are used. Measurements of the incorporation of gamma radiation taken at the start and at the end of a period of rehabilitation provide objective information about the effectiveness of different protective measures.
Minzdrav.—The Ministry of Health has asked us to look into the activities of the corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Belarus, doctor of technical science, Professor V.B. Nesterenko. The commercial business, of which he is director, the Institute of Radiation Safety “Belrad”, rather than contributing to finding the most effective solution to the complex problem of reducing the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, is exacerbating an already difficult social and psychological situation in the contaminated territories, through activities that are ill-conceived from a scientific and practical point of view. Bypassing the official channels of the Ministry of health and ComChernobyl, V.B.Nesterenko continues to publish his own bulletin, The Chernobyl disaster, a publication which, in the light of our current knowledge about radiological medicine, radioprotection and safety, does not stand up to scrutiny.
Unfortunately, Professor Nesterenko’s approach with its disregard for universally recognised principles of radiological protection, still finds support among a few politicians and scientists, poorly versed in matters of radiation protection. For example, when he was asked to preside on an independent commission of scientists by the Chernobyl committee the outcome was a completely unnecessary delay in attributing dose in the official 1998 register.
As for the scientists, including those from other countries, co-opted by Nesterenko to take part in the monitoring of the “Belrad” Institute’s activities, none are recognised general practitioners, or specialists in clinical medicine or ecopathology.
V. Nesterenko.—Have we really learnt nothing from the enormous damage done, at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, when the Ministry of Health of the USSR had a monopoly on information, and imposed secrecy on the consequences of the accident?
Displaying utter contempt for the laws of the nation, the Ministry of Health defends its monopoly on information that it presents to the public and to the authorities on the radioactive contamination of the population.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that I undertake this activity as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and that I publish the results of the measurements of the incorporation of caesium-137 in the bodies of the inhabitants of Belarus, that have been obtained not only by the Belrad institute, but also by other organisations in Belarus. The institute is authorised to publish these figures, with the names of the children’s families and the levels of incorporation of caesium-137 in their bodies.
Your criticisms of my publications contradict Article 22 of the law in Belarus “On radiological safety of the population” where it says “civil society associations serving the public interest are entitled, according to current legislation, to exercise control over the observance of the rules, regulations and hygiene standards in the area of radiological safety”. Your censorship is illegal and I do not accept it.
Your decision of 27th June 2000 to suspend Belrad’s HRS measurement activities has no legal basis, and your order to the directors of local public health authorities to break contracts with Belrad is illegal.
Collecting data in Belarus to show the correlation between radioactivity and the frequency of heart problems, kidney disease, diabetes, cataracts etc, is the only way to convince international organisations of the existence of negative consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, not only for the thyroid, but for other vital organs.
It would be helpful if this scientific research could be conducted with specialists from the West. It would allow us to obtain aid from charitable organisations in the West to help with decontamination and with medical treatment for children.
The Belrad Institute is willing to collaborate with Ministry of Health institutes in monitoring the health of children using HRS, and in their radioprotection, so as to reduce the health effects of the Chernobyl disaster.
On 14th September 2000, Nesterenko writes for the second time to President Lukashenko, asking him for his help and protection against the unfounded accusations concerning Belrad’s activities that were being made against him by the Ministry of Health. He reminds him that:
On 6th June 2000 the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) published a new scientific report (UNSCEAR-2000) in which new estimates about the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster were made. […] The Committee bases its calculations and estimates on standard international criteria in nuclear safety, adopted by the IAEA. The authors of the report state: “Although the personnel at the nuclear power station were subjected to the biggest risk from radiation, the majority of the population will probably not suffer any serious health consequences resulting from radiation from the Chernobyl accident”.
These conclusions are only possible because scientific information from Belarus linking illness with radiation exposure hardly ever reaches the UN.
Remaining silent about the extent of illness among children and the lack of information in the West on the subject, has resulted in a situation in which most foreign countries believe that there has been no significant impact on the people of Belarus from the biggest disaster of the century.
Today, only a few compassionate “fanatics” are helping the victims of the Chernobyl disaster, providing them with medicines etc, which cannot possibly meet the real needs of the people.
Basically, many errors and false calculations have been made in the radioprotection of the population in the fourteen year since the disaster at Chernobyl.
3. A LETTER TO NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS
On 1st November 2000, I sent a letter to the members of our network updating them on the situation in Belarus:
This morning Deputy Prime Minister Batura convened a meeting to discuss the differences of opinion between Nesterenko and the Ministry of Health in Belarus, after Nesterenko’s last letter written to President Lukashenka asking him for protection. Representatives from those ministries and governmental committees who support Nesterenko were present at the meeting. They could not express their opinions., as they are subordinate to Batura.
Nesterenko’s adversaries are furious about the fact that Nesterenko communicates with the West and receives aid from foreign organisations: “Foreigners support you because you are in conflict with the Ministry!” “I have been resisting the illegal claims made by the Ministry of Health since April 2000, and anyway I have been receiving help from various charitable organisations since 1995!”
Having failed to establish that the use of human radiation spectrometers (HRS) to measure the incorporation of radioactivity in the body was a medical intervention requiring a licence from the Ministry of Health, Nesterenko’s adversaries are now saying that he needs a licence to distribute the pectin-based product, when he already has a licence from the Ministry of Health to distribute it as a food additive.
Nesterenko is coming under enormous pressure, to force him to submit and to prevent him from disseminating information about the real consequences of the Chernobyl disaster on health, which the Ministry of Health has been minimising since 1986.
Nesterenko is standing firm. He is continuing with his activities, and is working within the law, but the only aid he now receives comes from non-governmental organisations. The Ministry of Health could in
terrupt his work at any time, even though it would be acting illegally.
It should be noted also that the Ministry of Health’s accomplices in the West continue to spread slander about both Professor Nesterenko and Professor Bandazhevsky. The latter still has a court case hanging over him like the Sword of Damocles.
Legal and financial aid from abroad is urgently needed to defend and to reinforce the position of these two independent scientists.
On 5th November, V. Nesterenko writes, in an insistent manner, to President Lukashenko again:
Once again, I find myself having to write to you to ask for your support in allowing me to continue with my radioprotection work with children from Belarus at the Belrad institute.[…]
On 1st November 2000, during a discussion with vice Prime Minister Batura, I was reproached for having asked for the support of scientists from Russia, Ukraine and from international public opinion. […] I was forced to take this action because my letters to the government, to the Security Council, to you yourself, about the dispute with the Ministry of Health, are blocked: they never reach their destination and each time, it is the Ministry of Health that arbitrates in the dispute.
During the meeting on 1st November, about Belrad’s activities, B. Batura, while admitting that he was not an expert in either medicine or physics, and that using a Human Radiation Spectrometer is a physical procedure, nevertheless concluded that the Belrad institute must obtain a licence from the Minister of Health, if it wanted to carry out measurements using HRS.
I was forced to consult the Ministry of Justice who concluded that examination of the population using a human radiation spectrometer is not mentioned in the list of interventions that required a licence. […]
The Belrad institute does not carry out medical interventions. It monitors the incorporation of caesium-137 in children’s bodies using HRS, and then offers them radioprotection in accordance with its statutory objectives.
Staff at the Institute hope that their work will be supported by the Head of State.
Following the response from the Ministry of Justice and no longer having the President’s ear, the Ministry of Health finally gave up on the “licence”. The struggle took up almost a whole year. “Our work around Chernobyl certainly comes up against some real obstacles” was Nesterenko’s laconic observation.
But there now began an apparently senseless attack, both from inside the country and abroad, on the distribution of pectin to children in the contaminated areas. Unfortunately, it was not only officials from the Belarusian government that were putting obstacles in Nesterenko’s way. A campaign of hostile disinformation was being disseminated by certain Western “benefactors”, who had no hesitation in slandering him. Nesterenko complained to the ambassador Wieck at the OSCE in a letter dated 29th September 2000.
I am surprised and upset by the fact that while a dispute on principles is going on between the Belrad institute and the Ministry of Health, the German association Aid to Chernobyl (Tschernobyl-Hilfe DVTH, Professor Lengfelder), in its comments on my article “The Minister of Health in the Republic of Belarus is covering up the truth about the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster on the health of children”, uses false information about me personally and about my work at the Institute of Atomic Energy at the Academy of Sciences, as well as our collaboration with medical practitioners from Belarus, and in effect is lending support to the illegal actions of the Ministry of Health against our institute.
I hope that Mrs Frenzel, as befits any honest individual, will retract the false information that she has published. She will have to answer to the law.
Mrs Frenzel, the author of the slander dated 29th August 2000 retracted nothing. Who were these German “benefactors”? Why, and in whose interest, were they acting in this way?
Chapter VI
RADIOPROTECTION SLANDERED
Professor Edmund Lengfelder is the director of the very wealthy Otto Hug institute in Munich and president of DVTH (Deutscher Verbande für Tschernobyl-Hilfe), and Mrs Frenzel is the vice-president. In an email to ZDF, written on 28th December 2004, Professor Lengfelder describes the institute as “a federation of 70 organisations and corporations that since 1990 have invested a total of 75 million euros in medical and humanitarian aid projects for the population around Chernobyl in Belarus. After visiting Belarus more than 150 times, I know the country and its political and social situation well”.
We do not know where the institute gets its funding, but it is able to provide a constant supply of money that far outweighs the amount gathered together by the other German NGO’s—barely enough to cover the low salaries paid to the staff of the 16 remaining LRMCs set up by Nesterenko in the most contaminated villages in Belarus. No less surprising is the aggression shown by this organisation towards Nesterenko and Bandazhevsky. They have no hesitation in slandering and vilifying these two independent scientists, whose only crime is to criticise the Belarusian Ministry of Health’s radioprotection policy for its servile attitude towards the negationist policy of the lobby in Vienna..
1. SLANDER
Mrs Frenzel’s report is dishonest and creates an entirely false image of Professor Nesterenko, both personally and in his professional life. Among other things, she reproaches him for his timidity, or even ambiguity, towards the nuclear lobby, whereas, she claims, the Otto Hug Institute is quite open in its criticisms.
In his article, Professor Nesterenko criticises the registers, the directives and estimates made by the Minister of Health in Belarus concerning the radioactive load in the population. […] However Professor Nesterenko does not explain in his article the main reason behind this attitude. He should have known that when government authorities evaluate health risks, they rely on the recommendations of Western organisations such as the IAEA, Euratom, the US Department of Energy and the United Nations. Before you criticise Belarus for its attitude in the face of these radiation problems, you should first of all direct your criticisms openly at the attitude of the international pro-nuclear organisations mentioned above.
After this little lesson in consistency, Mrs Frenzel gives some information about Nesterenko that bears no relation to the truth.
Nesterenko’s attitude to the policies adopted by Belarus on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster and the part he has played within the situation are problematical from various points of view. Professor Nesterenko is a physicist who was the director of the centre for research and atomic production at Sosny, near Minsk, during the Soviet era. Following certain incidents at the centre, he was sacked. This was years before the Chernobyl disaster. He then set up his company Belrad, which contained the word institute in its title. His company produced radiometers. After Chernobyl, he spent many years on the measurement of radioactivity in food, amongst other things, on behalf of the State. In the meantime, the authorities in Belarus began to do their own measurements, and Professor Nesterenko received practically no official contracts.
This text might have been dictated by the Minister of Health in Belarus in its campaign against Belrad, and Nesterenko replied in a long letter addressed to Mrs Frenzel, after he found what she had written on the official site www.chernobyl.info. He began by expressing his surprise at finding these falsehoods in a document produced by an institute directed by a professor at the University of Munich, then replied in detail to the two points cited above.
CONSISTENCY TOWARDS THE LOBBY
My criticisms of the Minister of Health do not date from yesterday but from 30th April 1986, when the Ministry, supported by the Moscow Professor L. Ilyin ignored my request that children should be given, as a matter of urgency, preventive iodine tablets and should be evacuated immediately from the Southern areas of Belarus.
In 1989, six doctors from the Ministry of Health in Belarus joined a group of 92 doctors from the USSR and signed a letter to President Gorbachev stating that there were no health consequences for the inhabitants of Belaru
s from the Chernobyl disaster, and accusing scientists from the Academy of Sciences in Belarus of incompetence and radiophobia. From 1991 to 1994, I presided over the Joint Committee of Experts (JCE) which contradicted the conclusion of the International Chernobyl Project (1991) and showed that the Chernobyl disaster had serious negative consequences for the health of the inhabitants.
The scientists from the Academy of Sciences of Belarus also stood out against the proposition of 35 rem over a lifetime. For their part, the doctors from the Belarus Ministry of Health solicited the support of experts from the IAEA, the WHO and the Russian Ministry of Health, to defend this inhumane concept.
I collaborate very closely with doctors working in the field and have nothing in common with the doctors working within the structures of government, who seem to have forgotten the Hippocratic oath and lost all real contact a long time ago, with medical practice and with the children who live around Chernobyl.
SACKED FOLLOWING “CERTAIN INCIDENTS”
I am surprised and sorry that Mrs Frenzel uses false information about my own and Belrad’s activities. Quite obviously she has chosen to speak to unscrupulous informants from the Ministry of Health who have given her inaccurate information about my career and about the Institute.
I feel sorry for her because she will have to retract the false information she has published, as befits any honest individual.
The National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (NASB) issued an official statement regarding my professional life.
When the accident at Chernobyl happened, I was the director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus (from July 1977 to July 1987) and straight away, I directed all my staff at the Institute towards the study of the radiological situation in Belarus. In May and June of 1986, maps showing the contamination of the areas of Gomel and Mogilev were completed by the Institute under my direction.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 32