Thyroid cancer rates among Ukrainian children were five times higher in 1993 than in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster, Britain's Imperial Cancer Research Fund said Wednesday.
Valerie Beral, head of the charity's Cancer Epidemiology Unit, said in the journal Nature that the incidence of thyroid cancer in children under 15 was fairly steady from 1986 to 1989 but then began to increase.The annual number of cases rose to 42 in 1993 from 11 in 1989 and eight in 1986.
In the areas farthest from Chernobyl, the incidence of thyroid cancer in 1990-92 was four per million among those under 18 at the time of the disaster, but 30 times higher in areas closer to the plant.
Beral said some doctors, herself included, the higher incidence might simply be the result of better medical monitoring in the wake of the disaster.
"But these latest figures suggest that more children really are developing thyroid cancer. Screening might cause an apparent 10-fold transient rise in the frequency of thyroid cancer at most, but in parts of the Ukraine the increase is considerably greater than that," she said.