With the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster having arrived, there has been a renewal of interest in how the disaster occurred and how people dealt with the immediate aftermath.
Alla Shapiro, a 32-year old pediatrician at the time, working at the Children’s Hospital in Kiev, has vivid memories of the response, as she and others dealt with a sudden influx of children who had been exposed to the disaster. “I really didn’t have time to get scared or to get prepared. We saw the children arriving in a panic and in tears. It was a stressful event, but you have to act and do what you have to do. The negative thing was that we didn’t have any instruction, knowledge or training in radiation, so we exercised our [medical] background and did what we could. We also didn’t have enough supplies and proper protective clothing to wear during examinations,” said Shapiro to Scientific American.
Shapiro also spoke of the need for the general public, not only those in the medical field, to understand the scope of disaster, especially when specialized issues such as radiation poisoning are in play. “Without knowledge in this field, people can’t do anything, but fortunately we do have experts in the area of radiation,” said Shapiro to Scientific American. “What I witnessed [at Chernobyl] helped me realize that strong communication between the government and the public and doctors is necessary, otherwise it can cause bad outcomes.”
Information from the Soviet archives has also indicated the famous Chernobyl disaster wasn’t the first problem with the plant, with revelations of a radiation release in 1982, and other emergencies in 1984, all of which were covered up or quashed at the time, according to new reporting from Reuters. “The 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy is a reminder of how state-sponsored disinformation, as propagated by the totalitarian Soviet regime, led to the greatest man-made disaster in human history,” the Ukrainian foreign ministry told Reuters.
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