Herald Sun , 26 April 2006, Internet: http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,18928967^25717,00.html
Nuclear bus crash
By Andrew Bolt
Who would have thought that 20 years after a nuclear explosion at Chernobyl vomited poison on the planet, we'd be mourning a disaster even more deadly.
But last week a bus carrying wedding guests from Raha, in northwest India, skidded off a rainy road and plunged into a pond.
At least 51 people died, more than have been killed so far by the Chernobyl blast.
As I said, deadlier than Chernobyl. But no professional alarmist can hope to pretend we all face doom from some Indian bus.
And so the papers this past week reported not this boring crash, but -- for the 20th straight year -- more apocalyptic hype about a nuclear disaster, which we're told may have killed hundreds of thousands of people, or could. But which in fact never did, or will.
Ignore all that wailing. Chernobyl's true message on today's anniversary is simple.
The Chernobyl accident killed very few people. More lives were lost from the panic than from the explosion.
This may shock those of you silly enough to believe Peter Garrett, Labor's former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, when he claimed the "accident caused the deaths of more than 30,000 people".
It will surely stun any who put their faith in the ACF when it said "250,000 people have died as a result of the Chernobyl tragedy". It may even alarm people who trusted any one of the Green franchises -- Britain's Green Party, say, which claimed 180,000 dead so far, and dying by the skipload.
Perhaps you should have listened instead to the world's greatest authorities on Chernobyl's effects on health -- experts who last year tried yet again to calm the world with the facts.
These were the members of the Chernobyl Forum -- scientists and doctors drawn from eight specialist United Nations bodies, including the World Health Organisation, International Atomic Energy Agency, UN Environment Program and UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. With them were others appointed by the worst-hit countries: Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. A smarter jury you won't get.
Their 600-page report last September concluded that the only long-term health effect of Chernobyl was thyroid cancer in children, easily cured in almost every case.
And bottom line: The true death toll so far was not 250,000 or even Garrett's 30,000, but fewer than 50.
That's right. Fifty, many of them workers hit by the initial blast.
The report did predict another 9000 people would one day die of illnesses caused by the fallout (if old age doesn't get them first), but that's just another prediction. All earlier ones were too high.
The forum chairman, Dr Burton Bennett, seemed sure these findings would finally end the debate.
On he chattered, assuming he'd be heard: Yes, Chernobyl had hit hard the workers at the site, and the children who'd suffered thyroid cancer afterwards.
"By and large, however, we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas, nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, within (sic) a few exceptional, restricted areas."
But what about the emotive stories we've since seen -- such as Richard Carleton's blame-Chernobyl report on Channel 9's 60 Minutes?
It seems some people still blame Chernobyl for anything and everything, so spooked have they become.
It's this great fear that is the real sickness of Chernobyl. As the Chernobyl Forum warned: "Persistent myths and misconceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in paralysing fatalism among residents of affected areas." Myths spread by whom, we might ask.
The forum said "lack of accurate information" had had a "damaging psychological impact", but it has also cost many lives.
Remember those scary stories at the time of the explosion that mutant-making radiation was spewing into the sky?
As medical studies confirm, pregnant women as far away as Italy, Denmark, Norway, Hungary and Greece were so terrified many had abortions rather than risk having a baby with three eyes. In all, the IAEA estimates as many as 200,000 extra women had abortions in the panic after Chernobyl.
What makes this tragedy worse is that the children they were carrying were in fact perfectly safe.
Dr Frank Castronovo, associate professor of radiology at the Harvard Medical School, summed up in his study on birth defects: "The scientific information available now shows no evidence that the radiation exposures of pregnant women from Chernobyl produced any harmful effects."
So, who does he blame for all those dead children? "(N)ewspaper reporters playing up anecdotal stories of children with birth defects and leukemia."
He's not alone in accusing professional panic merchants -- journalists and the green preachers who feed them horror stories.
A study by the Danish Board of Health likewise found that although "almost no increased rate of birth defects was expected" after Chernobyl "the role of the mass media" caused abortions to soar.
Fear was more fatal than fallout. But have we learned this lesson? Have we learned not to trust those whose job was to panic us about Chernobyl then and to panic us over global warming today?
Not a bit of it. Instead, Greenpeace, ever shameless, got acres of space in newspapers this month to again tell tales of radioactive corpses.
It had a new study, it claimed, that put the true death toll from Chernobyl at 200,000 so far, with another 93,000 to die lingering deaths.
Stuck in hyperdrive, it insisted that "one nuclear reactor can contaminate half the Earth".
Who called out Greenpeace for spreading such nonsense? Which reporter thought to accuse it of peddling baseless fears yet again of the kind that once terrified women into killing their unborn children?
Instead, readers were fed more overcooked headlines such as "Chernobyl still poisons bodies and minds" and "Chernobyl still killing 20 years on". All for an accident that's so far claimed fewer lives than a bus crash.
Agreed, Chernobyl was a tragedy. But the greater and deadlier tragedy was the fear deliberately spread by people who are still at that reckless game today.
Let's remember Chernobyl, but we remember it best by not forgetting who used it to frighten people to death.