Wednesday, June 13, 2012

New York Times: Haunted by "Ukraine's Poisoned Past"


June 12, 2012
Ukraine’s Poisoned Past. The New York Times.
By JERÉ LONGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/sports/soccer/a-visit-to-chernobyl-which-some-athletes-can-recall-firsthand.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120613

[Excerpt] "Stiliyan Petrov, 32, was nowhere near when Reactor No. 4 exploded. He was a boy of 6 in Bulgaria, more than 600 miles to the south. 

He became a soccer star, the captain of Aston Villa in England’s Premier League. 

In March, Petrov received a diagnosis of acute leukemia. The Bulgarian national team doctor said he believed the illness resulted from exposure to the radiation of Chernobyl and a failure at the time by the country’s Communist leadership to inform citizens of the danger.
 
“It was in the late spring, the population was eating fresh radioactive vegetables and other foods,” Mihael Iliev, the Bulgarian team doctor who treated Petrov for 14 years, told The Sun of London in April. “Many people who were kids back then suffered cancer because of this. We called them the Chernobyl kids. Most were born in the same region as Stiliyan.

Majia: Some secrets should not, and ultimately cannot, be hidden.

Efforts to conceal these types of secrets always produce worse outcomes than the path of truth and accountability.
 

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