Source: Institute of Science in Society

A group of doctors and scientists risked their lives and careers to help children living in the most contaminated areas of the Chernobyl fallout and discovered a simple treatment that clears the radionuclides from their bodies, offering hope for future generations of Chernobyl and Fukushima victims. (Dr. Mae-Wan Ho)

Vassili Nesterenko and Yuri Bandazhevsky, champions of the victims of Chernobyl

The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl contaminated vast areas of neighbouring Belarus to 37,000 Bq/m2. Agricultural production was halted on 264,000 hectares, where 2 million people live, among them 500,000 children [1].

Vassili Nesterenko (1934-2008), a physician from Belarus and a former director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, was one of the co-authors of a comprehensive report documenting the health impacts of Chernobyl (see [2] Chernobyl Deaths Top a Million Based on Real Evidence, SiS 55). Since 1990, he had been the director of the Belarusian independent Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), created in 1989 with the help of Soviet physicist, dissident, and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov (Nobel Peace Award, 1975), Belarusian writer and critic, Ales Adamovich, and Russian chess grandmaster and former world champion Anatoly Karpov. The mission of BELRAD was to document and study the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster [3]. Because of his work on Chernobyl, Nesterenko lost his job and was threatened internment in a psychiatric asylum. He escaped two attempts on his life.