”It was the endocrine organs* that were affected first. First it was
the thyroid gland, because it absorbs iodine, but the reproductive
system is also affected. There have also been many experiments
that have shown that the reproductive system is affected. Also the
mucous membranes, stomach and bowel, blood and other organs
are affected by radioactivity. We will continue to be affected out
here in this country because we still have many radioactive
elements that are active and are affecting our bodies.”


Igor Komisarenko washes his hands thoroughly as only a surgeon can. He sticks his hands out and has latex gloves put on. On the way into the operating theatre he jumps routinely over an extension lead snaking across the floor and supplying electricity to the apparatus. He stands on a little wooden stool in order to be level with the patient. The operation goes ahead at once. The assistant talks about his summer holiday and the anaesthetist reads a Spanish course, but there is full concentration. There is a production line of thyroid operations in Kiev.

An operation used to take seven hours, but now it takes only two to three. The doctors have learnt much from Chernobyl and have become better at diagnosing illnesses in their early stages. ”As endocrine specialists we’ve split our time frame in two: before and after Chernobyl, ” says Igor after the operation. ”Before Chernobyl it was unthinkable for children to have cancer. We had one or two – a maximum of three – cases per year. Since 1989 we already had seven cases of cancer. In 1991 there were 21 of them. From 1992-1994 we had around 41 cases per year. Later the numbers increased to 48, 50, and 42 incidents a year.”

”Just like all other politicians our managers also kept the accident a secret from us, ” remembers Igor. ”In the USA they wouldn’t say what went on in Los Alamos; here they wouldn’t say anything about Chernobyl. We didn’t know how serious the situation was. Nobody knew it. We were all assured that everything would be fine. For a week we had no conception of what had happened and what the consequences would be. We now know that several million curies** of radioactive iodine escaped into the atmosphere. The very first mistake that was made was our failure to make preventive effort with iodine. The thyroid gland, you see, is the very first to be affected.”

The thyroid gland produces vital hormones that regulate the body. They affect the brain of the foetus, the development of the skeleton, human intelligence and so on. After birth the hormones continue to control all the body’s processes. They are important for human development, women’s ability to have children etc. The hormones produced by the thyroid gland actually control the most fundamental aspects of a person’s life. The hormones contain iodine and insufficient iodine during a pregnancy can lead to the baby being born with a mental handicap. But iodine is also found in a radioactive form, which affects the development of the cells in the thyroid gland – and this can cause tumours.

As in the rest of the world there are many areas in the Ukraine where there is a lack of iodine. In these areas the people’s thyroid glands become enlarged in order to compensate for the poor quality of the hormones. The less natural iodine one has in the thyroid gland, the more radioactive iodine will be absorbed to compensate.

”This process is more active among children because they need more oxygen in their tissue and the hormones work more intensively in them” says Igor. “Therefore it’s children who generally become sick. We noticed the increase in 1989, but now the number of incidences of cancer has fallen. Now we have hardly any cases of cancer in children, although we can see the number of adult cases increasing.”

In 1981 there were six cases of child cancer per 100,000 inhabitants, which was equivalent to 0.05%. In 1996 the figure was 0.5%, which was 52 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. Out of Ukraine’s 25 regions, 50% of all the cancer patients came from Zhitomir, Tjernigov and Kiev – the regions closest to Chernobyl. Among the adult population there were 1,210 cases in 1991 and 2,173 in 2004. A significant rise, which is due to the fact that those who were children and teenagers at the time of the accident are now adults. Igor expects the figure to continue to rise as the group ages.

Before Chernobyl cancer of the thyroid gland didn’t appear in the statistics and the few cases that occurred were registered under ’other types’. Today it has its own column heading. The latent period – i.e. the period from when an influential event takes place until when a reaction is observable – is three to four years for children and seven to ten years for adults. Therefore fonumber of years after the accident no reaction could be seen among the population.

In order for society to be able to react to the conclusions of the scientific community, however, you first have to ’adapt science to politics’, as Igor expresses it. ”When we started to shout about the increase in the number of cases of thyroid cancer three years after Chernobyl nobody believed us. For the first two to three years some representatives of, for example, the IAEA*** came along. We were told that we shouldn’t expect any serious consequences for the first ten years. They were basing this on experience from the Mashall islands, Los Alamos, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, they didn’t take into consideration that it wasn’t an atomic bomb that had exploded. It was a reactor and a lot of iodine had been blasted out into the atmosphere. After three to three-and- a-half years we had patients with thyroid cancer at the clinic. And that type of cancer is typically caused by radioactivity. They were highly differentiated forms of cancer: papillary**** and follicular*****.”

At an IAEA meeting in Tjernigov in 1990 Igor got up and said that there had been a rise in the number of cases of cancer in children. The atmosphere was very strained among the politicians and scientists at the meeting, who didn’t want to listen to that. Just two years later he succeded in proving with scientific certainty that this type of cancer is caused by radioactivity.

”In 1990-1992 the number of cases of cancer among children had risen and was continuing to rise. It was the first piece of evidence. The second piece of evidence was the fact that these children came from areas close to Chernobyl. This shows that the more radioactivity one has been exposed to, the greater the chance of developing cancer. Cancer is dependent on the dose of radioactivity. The third piece of evidence was that the highly differentiated papillary form of cancer is typically caused by radiation. The fourth piece of evidence was that with this type of cancer metastases - quickly growing tumours - begin to develop very early. All these pieces of evidence pointed to Chernobyl as the cause. All these diseases didn’t just spring up for no reason.”

The politicians and the scientifc community listened but it wasn’t until 1996, i.e. ten years after the disaster, that the increase in the number of cases of thyroid cancer was officially recognised as a consequence of the Chernobyl accident.

”Scientists will never give up saying what they think,” says Igor in answer to why he didn’t remain silent like many of his colleagues. ”They will continue doing their work in order to collect more evidence. Politicians are politicians. It’s a section of the population which keeps to specific laws in all countries and it’s hard to show them something that goes against their opinion. This was the first time in the world that it happened. The Atomic bomb explosions didn’t have the same consequences. Millions of curies** of radiation leaked out into the atmosphere from the Chernobyl accident.”

Another reason why he didn’t remain silent is probably because the prominent status his family had in the Ukraine meant that it couldn’t, just as a matter of course, be controlled by the communist system. The Komisarenko family is renowned in the Ukraine. Igor Komisarenko’s grandfather was a smith in a small village and had to provide for 12 family members in a country with a food shortage. People ate potatoes almost exclusively and there was tough discipline in the family. Nearly all the children became victims of the famine and only Igor’s father and his two siblings survived. His father broke with family tradition and studied and became a pharmacist in the village. Later he advanced his career in the medical system, became a director of the university in Kharkiv and subsequently vice-director for the Ministry of Health in the Ukraine in 1939. In 1965 he opened the Komisarenko Institute in Kiev, of which Igor is now the manager.

Igor spent his time during the war in the Urals, far from occupied Ukraine, with his mother and his brother Sergiy, who was two years his junior. Although his father remained in the Ukraine he still had a great influence on the two brothers. He was strict and purposeful and the brothers both became academicians with high positions. Sergiy became a biochemist and has been vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers and the Ukraine’s Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Britain.

The surroundings of the river Dnieper used to be an area of outstanding natural beauty. In the days of the Soviet Union it was a place where many high-ranking families from all the republics had summerhouses. The Komisarenko family also came to this area, of course. During fishing trips to the river Sergiy had often wondered what would happen if there was an explosion at the large nuclear power station nearby. Therefore, when this actually did occur he was quick to react. Since he was good at English he often listened to ’Voice of America’ and the BBC and thus heard about the accident. He took a Geiger counter from his institute and drove along the small roads towards the disaster area. As a scientist he realised at once that there would be severe consequences for the people.

Two days after the accident he took readings along the banks of the river Dnieper, midway between Kiev and Chernobyl. The apparatus gave such high readings that he couldn’t even make an estimated average. It was hot and people were bathing in the water, but when Sergiy explained what he was doing with the apparatus they hurried away again.

At one point Sergiy was the most senior authority on immunology research. He therefore expected that he would be given the task of studying what the consequences were, but the authorities never contacted him. He asked the Health Minister but was turned away – there was no danger and therefore no need for special investigations. Sergiy therefore decided, on his own initiative, to start an investigation. He assembled some colleagues who were specialists in the human immune system and who were accustomed to performing research, but the question was whom they should study.

When the Minister would not help Sergiy decided to contact the army. The people who had been called in from the reserves actually worked around the nuclear power station and therefore constituted a perfect group for an investigation. All human beings have different immune systems. If there is an outside influence, positive or negative, you have to use an enormous number of people in order to make comparisons. Ordinarily it is almost impossible, but in this case it was possible to find an almost homogeneous group; all men, with no great variation in age and who would all be exposed to the same influence. It would be very precise and it would not be necessary to have a great number of people to carry out the investigation.

The leader of the Soviet army’s medical corps was actually a scientist and was therefore immediately amenable to the idea. At that point the official maximum safe radiation dose was considered to be 25 REM It is the so-called biological equivalent to X-rays, an accumulated dose which people receive over a period of time. It was agreed that Sergiy could take measurements for a group of 100 workers before, during and after they had been in the Chernobyl zone. Furthermore there would be stringent control to ensure that people did not receive a dose higher than the 25 REM which was considered to be safe.

The result of the investigation showed that the number of immune cells, which are responsible for the so-called natural immunity and which combat viruses and cancer, fell dramatically as a result of the radioactive influence. In some people these cells were completely eliminated.

This might not seem so strange today, but when the results of the research were made public Sergiy was met by a wall of resistance. The leader of the Soviet army’s mediparticipating in the research, but he chose not to obey orders.

The Health Minister rejected the results completely and when they heard about it in Moscow they became very angry. However, they could not do anything because Sergiy’s institute and his family were highly esteemed in Soviet scientific circles.

In order to get the attention of the public Sergiy invented the expression ’Chernobyl-AIDS’. What he had witnessed was an acquired immune deficiency’ just like AIDS. Only it was caused by radiation.

It was three years before the first consequences of Chernobyl could be seen in the thyroid gland. Similarly, the deficient immune systems and many other illnesses that are found in the Ukraine and Belarus are probably just the first signs science has seen after 20 years. ”Genetic changes won’t be seen for 50-100 years,” says Igor. ”There are undoubtedly more surprises on the way. If you visit all sorts of medical institutes here - for example ear, nose and throat or general surgery – they’ll tell you that they’ve noticed an increase in some disease or other. Why is there such an increase? Is it because of the radioactivity and new chemical microelements affecting the human body? You can assume whatever you like. Chernobyl is just like some big laboratory in the Ukraine, where they’ve been experimenting on human beings.”




About EarthVision's 20 Years 20 Lives Project.



- Meeti Grigorij Sorikov, Pensioner, Belarus
- Meet Hanna Koslova, Wife and Mother, Ukraine
- Meet Galina Bandazhevskaya, Pediatrician, Minsk, Belarus
- Meet Valentina Smolnikowa, Buda-Koshelevo, Belarus
- Meet Alexander Filippov, Retired School Teacher, Babichi village, Belarus
- Meet Constantine Checherov, Nuclear Physicist, Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia / Slavutich, Ukraine
- Meet Natalia Ivanovna Ivanova, Deputy Director, Vesnova Orphanage, Mogilev Oblast, Belarus
- Meet Danilo Vezhichanin, Mayor, the village of Yelno, Rivne Oblast, Ukraine


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* The endocrine organs – these are the organs which render secretions directly into the bloodstream.

** Curie (Ci) is a unit which was formerly used for measuring the strength of radioactive sources. One curie is defined as 3.7x1010 incidences of atomic decay per second. This unit of measurement is named after the French science pioneer, Pierre Curie, who with his wife Marie Curie was the first to use the term ’radioactivity’.

*** IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is a UN organisation whose purpose is to control nations’ use of nuclear technology. The IAEA was started in 1957 as a part of the ”Atoms for Peace” programme. Many environmental organisations criticise the IAEA for being an organisation that serves to spread and promote the nuclear power industry.

**** From a papilla - a small nipplelike projection. Papillary cancer - the most common and most treatable type of thyroid cancer. 85% of thyroid papillary cancers occur due to radiation exposure. (http://www.endocrineweb.com/capap.html)

***** From a follicle - a small cavity or sac. Follicular cancer is the second most common cancer form. It is considered more malignant (aggressive) than papillary carcinoma. It is rarely associated with radiation exposure (http://www.endocrineweb.com/capap.html)


Text: Mads Eskesen
Translation: Angela Heath

Photos: Mads Eskesen and Gabriala Bulisova

The story is based on interviews in 2004 and in 2005 by Marianne Barisonek and by Mads Eskesen