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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Most of those estimates haven't held up, after this many years those deaths should be noticeable. The only cancer they can observe Chernobyl having an effect is thyroid cancer, which kills very few people.

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> which kills very few people.

I really don't understand the exclusive focus on deaths here. Cancer and genetic deformations can make your life hell even if they don't cause death.

It is not an exclusive focus on deaths, it is on all cancers and they did not spike as claimed by more pessimistic models. There were a few slight increases (mostly in thyroid cancer) but also a lot more testing being done that makes it a bit harder to normalize the statistics -- this may also have dropped the death rate slightly, as cancers caught early due to increased testing are more likely to be treatable.

Do you mean the number of death because of Tchernobyl is negative (less death than if Tchernobyl did not occur) ?

No, I am suggesting that part of the reason the death rate is much lower than predicted is that the testing rate has gone way up (and stayed up as testing became better and cheaper) and treatments have improved significantly, so incidences of cancer that might have been discovered late with few treatment options in the 90s are now detected early and treated as a chronic condition. More deaths overall, but a lot less than what was expected.

If you live in the fallout region then you are going to be placed in a high-risk category and are going to be watched more closely for cancer than the general population. By observing something we change it.

Most of the cancer treatments that make your life hell aren't commonly used on thyroid cancer. Generally you have part of the thyroid removed, and quite often it can safely be ignored with no harm done to the patient.

What about child birth defects ?

What childbirth defects?

I don't think the UN team was able to attribute any child birth defects to increased radiation. The horror books with pictures of them are shock collections of deformed children. It's possible that the rampant alcoholism of the latter Soviet era was the likely cause.

Alcoholism causes birth defects? How?

A simple google search will bring up hundreds of articles linking alcohol consumption during pregnancy to birth defects. It is a well established relationship.

In the US we even have warnings on all alcoholic beverages that say pregnant women should not drink alcohol.

I looked at the CDC's page (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fasd/alcohol-use.html). It contains a number of very negative effects from drinking alcohol while pregnant. But because the context was birth defects caused by radiation, I was thinking more in terms of visible deformities - which can be caused by radiation, but which are much less significant from alcohol.

Perhaps I was being too limited in my concept of "birth defects" - including for radiation. If the radiation while pregnant (or before) gives the child cancer at five, is that a "birth defect"? Maybe not, in the way I was thinking, but I can see how it might be thought of that way.

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