Oddly enough, the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in
history has been marked by journalism about animals. Two magazines, Wired and Harper’s, have published lengthy articles about
the rebirth of animal life in the so-called exclusion zone around the Chernobyl
nuclear plant in Ukraine.
All well and good, but given
the recent Japanese nuclear accident, wouldn’t you rather
know what has happened to the, er, people who were affected by
Chernobyl?
I know such a person. Her name is Maria Gawronska. Thirty years
old, smart and attractive, Maria is a native of Poland who moved to New York in
2004. I met her through my fiancée maybe four years ago. She always wore a
turtleneck, even on the hottest of days.
Maria’s hometown, Olsztyn, in
northern Poland, is more than 400 miles from Chernobyl. She was 5 years old in
April 1986 when the reactor melted down, spewing immense amounts of
radioactivity upwind, where it spread across Ukraine, Belarus and, yes, northern
Poland.
“At first,” Maria said, “they said it was an explosion but it wasn’t
dangerous.” But within a few days, the Soviet Union grudgingly
acknowledged the accident. Maria recalls that everyone
was given iodine tablets, and told to remain indoors. She stayed in the house
for the next two weeks.
She also remembers hearing people say that it would
be years before Poles knew the health consequences of the accident. Among other
things, radiation can wreak havoc on the thyroid gland; that is why people take
iodine tablets, to minimize the amount of radioactive iodine that their thyroids
absorb.
Sure enough, over the course of the last
quarter-century, there has been an explosion of thyroid problems in Olsztyn.
Maria told me that entire hospital wings are now devoted to thyroid disease.
This is no exaggeration. Dr. Artur Zalewski, an Olsztyn thyroid surgeon,
confirmed that his practice had seen a huge increase in thyroid operations since
the early 1990s. Some people have cancerous thyroids, but many more have
enlarged thyroids, or thyroids that have stopped functioning properly.
Dr.
Zalewski also cautioned me, though, that there was no scientific proof
connecting thyroid disease to Chernobyl. Partly because of Soviet intransigence,
and partly because of what The Lancet would describe as “considerable logistical
challenges,” epidemiological studies were never begun that might have helped
link the disaster to Poland’s thyroid problems.
The
studies that have been done have focused on cancer. According to The Lancet, it
is possible that increases in childhood leukemia and breast cancer in Belarus
and Ukraine can be attributed to Chernobyl. But because of “flawed study
design,” these studies are not definitive.
When I e-mailed Maria’s mother,
Barbara Gawronska-Kozak, however, she was adamant: “I am convinced that
Chernobyl increased thyroid problems.” Barbara, a scientist herself (though not
an epidemiologist), told me that this was what the “average citizen of Poland”
believed. She herself required a thyroid operation a decade after the accident.
Her mother had two thyroid operations. Her best friend had a thyroid operation.
An old high school friend recently had a goiter removed. Maria told me that her
father was the only family member who had not had a thyroid problem.
Around
five years ago, it was Maria’s turn. Gradually, her thyroid become so enlarged
that it impinged on her trachea, making it hard to breathe in certain positions.
The unsightly growth, of course, was why she always wore a turtleneck. A
specialist in New York told her that he had never seen anything quite like it,
and that the operation to correct it was high risk and could possibly damage her
vocal cords. So Maria decided to return to Poland and have the operation in her
hometown. She did so earlier this year.
Just as in Chernobyl’s case, it will
be years before we know how the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power
Station will affect the health of those who lived nearby. Although much less
radiation escaped,
it did leak into the water, and traces have been found
in the food supply. It makes one wonder how to deal with nuclear power, which
offers the tantalizing prospect of clean energy — along with the ever-present
risk of disaster should something go wrong. These are not simple questions — as
we are reminded whenever there is an accident like Fukushima Daiichi. Or
Chernobyl.
For Maria, at least, the story ends happily. Dr. Zalewski, who
operated on her, didn’t flinch when he saw the size of her thyroid. The
operation was a success. Her vocal cords are just fine. She has more energy than
she has had in years.
Maria told me that while she was in Olsztyn, she sought
out old friends. As soon as they heard why she had returned, she said, “They all
laughed and pointed to their own scars.”
When I saw her not long after she
returned to New York, I couldn’t help noticing her own small scar. She wasn’t
wearing a
turtleneck.
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