Introduction:

A quarter of all thyroid cancer cases among patients who were children at the time of the Chernobyl accident 32 years ago, are “probably” due to high doses of radiation received during and after the event.

That is the conclusion of the latest study undertaken by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), which looked at cancer rates between 1991 and 2015.

The children affected lived in the areas of the former Soviet Union relatively close to the nuclear reactor site at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, where explosions at the nuclear reactor there on 26 April 1986, released huge doses of radioactive iodine.

Around 116,000 people were evacuated from the area at the time, and a further 230,000 in the years that followed  .

Hans Vanmarcke, who chairs UNSCEAR, told Mustafa Al Gamal that the committee had already published three reports on the health consequences of the accident – the last one being in 2008.