Commento: mentre migliaia di miliardi vengono spesi in propaganda per "tranquillizzare" la gente ed inventarsi improbabili virus inviati dalla provvidenza, poco o niente viene speso per informare e prendere le opportune precauzioni, tipo limitare l'allevamento e l'agricoltura alle zone MENO inquinate del pianeta. Ma il tempo gioca contro le strategie della propaganda globalizzata, è ora di fare qualcosa di concreto, ad esempio SMETTERE IMMEDIATAMENTE di contaminare. Non ci credete che ci prendono in giro? Guardate cosa risponde il Prefetto di Trieste alla richiesta di dire alla popolazione quali sono i piani in caso di emergenza nucleare!

Early a couple mornings before Christmas, in the pitch dark of 7:30, Volodya honks his horn under my window. I go downstairs and let him in. He asks for his entire week's pay in advance, and then some. He needs a hundred dollars, U.S. cash, to fix his shot bearings and a host of other ills ranging from finicky brakes to no benzene. If I ever saw a set-up, this is it. If I give him a hundred dollars, I'll never see him again. But on the other hand, how can I say no? The guy saved my butt. He gave me his home. He didn't kill me. Do I want to drive around in a car with no benzene, no bearings, no brakes? No way. So I fork over more cash than a nice whore makes in a month, figuring that if he runs off, I'll have Ljudmula hunt him down and kill him. She's been warning me that Voldya and Andrew are suspicious types. She can tell by their rotten Russian and the sleazy look in their eyes. But I'm not one to say no. I hand him a hundred bucks. He's supposed to be back at 2:00 to take me to a children's hospital where Regina, of Greenpeace, has set up an appointment for me to meet with some doctors and take some pictures.

Two o'clock arrives but Volodya doesn't. Plotting his murder, I huff off to find a taxi - no mean feat on a sloppy day in a town that's low of fuel. By taxi I mean any given motorist who wants to make a little dough. What you have to do is hold your hand out until somebody stops. This takes quite a while because even on a main avenue in downtown Kiev, only a couple of cars pass in a given minute or two.

But one finally stops. The driver's a young guy. We don't talk about price or anything. I show him the address of the clinic and off we go. Then he says in English, "Please fasten your seat belt." By gosh it turns out this isn't just your average motorist hoping to make a little dough. He's the World Champion Trampoline Jumper. He won the title in Birmingham, Alabama and therefore speaks a little English. I give him thirty rubles for the ride, which is cheap considering the privilege.

I get some good information at the children's hospital. A stately, exhausted doctor named Olga tells me that Ukraine, as a whole, is in terrible health. She does not claim any significant increases in cancer, leukemia or birth defects. The problem is in the general state of health. Everybody, especially children, has a generally poor state of health. Everything in their bodies is breaking down and there is no single explanation for it. This problem has certainly worsened since Chernobyl, and especially over the last couple of years. But Chernobyl is not the only culprit. The pollution and malnutrition combine to weaken and attack the body. Just as important, perhaps, is the stress of knowing that all this is happening to everyone, plus the stress of unemployment or chronic underemployment, plus not knowing if there will be any food in town, let alone in the cupboard, by the end of the winter, let alone by the next harvest, plus the inevitable family problems produced by hungr, illness, poverty, alcoholism and living in close quarters, plus they really don't even know what kind of a country they live in or how to replace the ruins of the centrally planned economy, plus several of the other former Soviet states are breaking out in civil war, which could happen in Ukraine, which is artificially attached to Crimea, which doesn't like being Ukrainian. It's all enough to make anybody ill.

The combination produces what Olga calls the synergy effect. The sum of the ills is greater than the combined normal prognoses. In fact, the sum of the ills is an illness nobody's ever seen before. It varies from individual to individual. It's as if each person had a new and unique disease. You can't tell which is deadly, which will cure itself. Measles isn't just measles anymore. Treatments don't yield normal results. Textbooks no longer apply. The medical progress of the twentieth century doesn't count for much. They're starting from scratch.

What they're dealing with is a syndrome resulting from a massive attack on the body's immune system. The body, starved for nutrients, is glad to latch onto whatever elements that come onboard, even if it's cesium, strontium or plutonium. The isotopes make themselves right at home, radiating the immediately surrounding areas and all the blood that passes by.

This isn't an illness; it's a syndrome. It's an immune deficiency, and it's acquired from the environment. Put it all together and it spells AIDS. HIV doesn't necessarily enter into it (though often enough it does), so people refer to it as Chernobyl AIDS. Unlike HIV, it isn't contagious, but quite like HIV, it has no cure.

The real problem, properly defined, isn't the suppressed immune system but the unpredictable responses to treatments. The diseases are unique and the treatments are unknown.

Olga thinks the solution is not in just building another hospital or institute but rather to recognize the problem and develop a new medical specialty. Of course no such action is being considered in Ukraine or anywhere else in the world.

Another doctor, darnk and serious, tells me that this new medical information is not completely new to the world. A considerable body of data exists in the Moscow Scientific Institute, but it is classified, so no one has access to it. The data comes from victims of a nuclear accident at Chelyabinsk and also people subjected to nearby atomic tests. He saw secret papers referring to this data and had already deduced its existence when Moscow sent investigators after the Chernobyl accident. From the questions they asked it was clear they had already dealt with similar problems. They already knew things it would take Ukrainian doctors several years to figure out through trial and error with thousands of human guinea pigs.

They call this "catastrophe medicine" - the necessary use of patients for experimentation, the direct application of theory to practice.

What Olga and her colleagues have done at this particular hospital is develop a computer program that analyzes all of a patient's functions to produce a single holistic treatment for a given individual's multifarious ailments. It works well, or would if they had the medicines the treatments call for. But this is a hospital without medicines. They don't even have a ribbon for the computer printer. They show me a print-out. It's too faint to read in a room that's down to its last light bulb.

Olga lets me walk around to take pictures of half-dead kids who are conceivably radiation victims. One is a very small girl with acute immunodeficiency which has led to kidney failure. A fat little baby suffers multiple genetic abnormalities, including Down's Syndrome and lack of anus. Another is a boy just withering away for reasons unknown. Another boy was doing fine until his father got drunk and smashed up his car and the boy in the passenger seat. Now the boy's in a coma. The doctors have little hope for him so a psychic is in there waving her hands over him as if caressing an invisible essence outside his body. A doctor says the boy showed a little response, a movement of a leg. The doctor doesn't look optimistic. He says the psychic is a last resort.

E ora leggete qua per capire mucca pazza:

Iiuri Shcherbak, I've been told, is one of few government officials who is honest and intelligent. He never joined the Communist party. He used to be a doctor and has, in fact, published a book on Chernobyl, Chernobyl: A Documentary Story. It relates a lot of damning evidence, not as straight data but rather as personal accounts of what happened and how it affected people.

He doesn't want to tell me anything about alleged cover-ups, but he wants it known that while the official data says 50,000,000 curies were thrown out of the reactor, it was really three times that and perhaps as many as a billion. At least 50 tons of fuel went up into the air, and perhaps a lot more. The clouds of radioactivity have circled the earth several times. In eastern Europe, 7 million hectares were highly contaminated. In Ukraine, 2.5 million hectares are radiating more than 5 curies of cesium per square kilometer. A quarter of Ukraine and a third of Belarus are contaminated. The soil cannot be used for many years to come. Maybe it will wash away to poison some other place for a while, or maybe it will hang around for a couple dozen milennia.

And the world hasn't heard the last of Chernobyl. The sarcophagus was built with many vents. Rain comes in through those vents and gradually dissolves the remaining nuclear fuel and washes it into some of the 327 offices, halls, closets and other rooms in the building. Nobody knows exactly where the fuel is or where it's building up. The only way to find out is to drill into the rooms, one by one, and send in a probe to take readings.

Last July the readings were not good. Somewhere within the building, enough radioactive material was collecting to reach critical mass. If it continued, it would blow up - not like the little steam explosion that blew the roof apart. It would be an atomic explosion like the one that blew Hiroshima apart. Such an explosion would not only throw the rest of the fuel and its radioactive surroundings into the air. It could also destroy the two neighboring reactors that were still operating. All told, it could have resulted another three or four hundred tons of nuclear fuel into the atmosphere - several times more than in the original explosion. If that wasn't the end of the world, it would certainly bring it within view.

But they managed to drill into the room where the radioactive materials had accumulated, and then were able to pump in something that slowed the rate of reaction. Now Shcherbak says they are almost totally absolutely one hundred percent positive that a similar incident cannot happen again. When he tells me that he reported this information to people in the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, he shows me how they put their heads in their hands and rocked them back and forth.

The government of Ukraine has announced an international competition offering big bucks to anyone who can design a functional and effective new sarcophagus. The one they have isn't going to last as long as the radioactivity. It was built in a big hurry by people who didn't feel like taking extra pains to do the job right. The plutonium inside will be radioactive for about a quarter of a million years. The sarcophagus is good for thirty. If there's an earthquake or something, it could be less. At this rate, Ukraine can look forward to building ten thousand sarcophagi, each enclosing the ones built before.

God forbid there should be an earthquake before the year 248,008 A.D. If a wall fell in, it would heave up several more of the 35 tons of radioactive dust that is in the sarcophagus today.

There used to be four reactors operating at Chernobyl, with a fifth under construction. Number 4 blew up. They shut down its neighbor, Number 3 for the obvious reason. Even before the fire at 4 was out, liquidators were carrying away fuel rods from Number 3. The rods were stacked on platforms that looked like funeral biers. Liquidators carried them away by hand, running just as fast as their legs could carry them.

In June 1991, Ukraine decided to shut down the last two reactors by 1995, but in October of that year, Number 2 caught fire, destroying the roof of the building. Then Number 1 caught fire when some corroded wire shorted out. Ukraine decided to shut the whole thing down ASAP, to wit, 1993 (though in 1995 it would still be operating).