“Did you know people are protesting every day in front of the WHO offices in Geneva against access of the International Atomic Energy Agency to all WHO communications with a right to veto nuclear related content?” A friend who sent me a clipping on Chernobyl children, came up with the question.

Unaware of the tightly-knit relationship between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and WHO, I did some research – and discovered his account was accurate. Since April 2007 activists for an independent WHO have been standing in front of the offices from 8 till 6, Monday to Friday.

The protocol between IAEA and WHO says “when either organization proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement.” Both organizations may apply limitations “for the safeguarding of confidential information.” WHO maintains the mechanism has no impact.

Many find WHO’s defense unconvincing because of the mere rationale behind IAEA’s existence, which is to advocate non-proliferation of nuclear weapons as well promote nuclear energy. Critics also mistrust WHO’s defense because of its strikingly mild estimation of the health effects of the Chernobyl explosion in April 1986. The accident is now promoted as a “low-dose event” by IAEA/WHO and the UN.

In 2001 the interdependency of IAEA and WHO was put on the agenda of the World Health Assembly without avail. Retired professor of medicine Michel Fernex spoke out against the institution’s ill-conceived marriage during the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg two years later.

Fernex and twenty colleagues found themselves calling for WHO independence again in 2008, urging the public to send a letter to WHO’s director-general Madam Chan. The appeal points to WHO’s paralysis in its struggle against passive smoking, due to infiltration by the tobacco lobby. The appellants described WHO’s infiltration by the nuclear energy lobby however as “incomparably more powerful, represented by the IAEA, at the top of the UN hierarchy.”

The Chernobyl Forum, denominator for IAEA, WHO and other international organisations, writes in it’s 2005 Report on the nuclear accident, that among the 600,000 most exposed the number of deaths will not exceed a total of 4000. The Forum based its findings on the standards of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP).

Independent experts and advocacy groups have been voicing fundamental criticism on the scientific underpinning of IAEA/WHO and ICRP estimations long before 2005. In the US the late John W. Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology (University of California at Berkeley), refuted claims that very low doses of radiation may be safe.

Chris Busby, a UK chemical physicist, has been striving since 1992 to uncover the reasons why radioctivity as a cause for many cases of cancer and leukaemia in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia was officially denied. The downplaying of Chernobyl’s effects, says Busby, has no scientific basis, because “the underlying scientific model is based on external irradiation and risk is quantified in terms of dose, now acknowledged to be meaningless for many types of radioactivity when they are inside the body.” Busby claims the risk factors used by ICRP for low-level exposure were in error by 100-fold.

Much of Busby’s work is devoted to the impact of internal radiation from inhaled or digested radioactive atoms or materials, making cell dose a causal parameter in stead of radiation dose. The message was longtime ignored. As Fernex explained: “Half a century after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the official model of risk is still based on the external, very short but very strong gamma irradiation, released by the nuclear flash of the bomb. As Dr. Gentner from UNSCEAR repeated in Kiev (2001) : “I refuse to consider whether a dose is external or internal, what matters is the dose”.

Green parties in the European Parliament, alarmed by initiatives to allow recycling of radioactively contaminated materials, looked for independent opinions and set up the European Committee on Radiation Risk in 1997. During one of its meetings Canadian expert Rosalie Bertell declared ICRP was biased and underestimated the impact of low-level radiation.

Greenpeace published a counter evaluation a year after the Chernobyl Forum Report was published, writing that IAEA/WHO had grossly underestimated morbidity and deaths due to Chernobyl. “The most recently published figures indicate that in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine alone the accident resulted in an estimated 200,000 additional deaths between 1990 and 2004.” Greenpeace wants a more extensive body of data to be considered by the international community. This was 2006.

Today Busby believes the authorities can no longer deny the truth, now that ICRP has admitted their wrong on parts of his critique. Busby: “We are now witnessing a slow-motion paradigm shift.”^[1] But it’s the slow pace that might threaten the population in affected areas most.

The EU has been calling upon the authorities of Belarus to ratify IAEA’s safeguard protocol on nuclear power and to observe international safety requirements during construction of a new nuclear power plant. Building will start at the end of 2009 in the north-western region of the country, less than 20 km from the border with Lithuania, within 5 km from a number of villages and on the border of the Vilnija, a tributary to the Nemen river which flows into the Baltic Sea. The plant with two 1000 MW reactors will start operating in 2016.

In November 2008 the UN issued a new action plan for the Chernobyl affected regions to 2016[2] Although the first paragraph of the 10 page outline mentions “millions of people” living in areas “officially classified as ‘contaminated’ by radiation” as well as “elevated rates of thyroid cancer”, the nuclear disaster is branded as a “low-dose event”. This name is cynical in its reference to both the faulty claim of harmlessness of low dose radiation and to the questionable low number of Chernobyl’s victims.

The action plan is again founded on the Chernobyl Forum 2005 Report, presented as “scientific consensus” which UN seeks to be adopted by the “scientific community and environmental organizations”.

Of course UN wants organisations and governments to “complete” the radiological remediation of populated areas. The classification of zones has to be revisited in accordance with international standards, the shelter around the damaged reactor has to be transformed into a safe system and radioactive waste managed safely.

But UN wants even more to let bygones be bygones, as UN claims further negative health effects for people in contaminated areas are “very unlikely”. The basic message is : let’s go for economic development to “overcome the negative legacy of the Chernobyl accident”.

A major part of contaminated land outside the Exclusion Zone has to “return to economic activities” to improve “the income of small private farmers by helping them produce products that meet health and safety standards”. The negative image of products from the Chernobyl region is to be overcome through “better information”.

The problems of the population are exhaustively described as psychological. Radiation is a “negative legacy”, the population has lapsed into “apathy”, experiencing a “dependency syndrome”. It has to “overcome fears associated with radiation”, the area suffers a “stigma”, “psychological stress” of the people living nearby has to be “eased”, “confidence and trust” have to be regained, in sum: time for “psycho-social recovery”.

How? Involved international organisations are explicitly instructed to disseminate the message of ‘low dose is low risk’ in order to “inform the public”. The confidence of the population has to be constructed through promotion, funded by a 2.5 million dollar budget recently granted by the UN for “translating science into accurate, practical advice”. The IAEA press release of April 26, 2009: “Providing scientifically sound information for Chernobyl-affected communities is a shared priority for UN work on Chernobyl.”

The media are a major target of UN policy, for, obviously, they got it all wrong. UN wants the media to “rely on up-to-date, scientifically accurate information in reporting on Chernobyl-related issues, and eschews alarmist reports on radiation”.

IAEA has solidly paved the way to broaden support for nuclear energy in Europe’s most vulnerable region. In UN’s policy plan, which gives a detailed list of projects, the one key word for a sustainable future is absent: green.

No mention is made of developing alternative energy sources. Several UN institutions will implement the plan, but the UN Environmental Programme has no role in it. While Ban Ki-Moon in Poznan called for a green deal, this outlook is completely absent for the Chernobyl region.

On the eve of their vacation Belarus denied Chernobyl children a visit to Switzerland. Every year numerous groups in Europe and elsewhere reach out to receive these children for a 4 – 6 weeks pause from living in unhealthy conditions.

President Lukashenko cancelled the Swiss visit because he fears children will seek asylum, as did Tanya Kazyra in 2008. Belarus also tried to deny the children a visit to the Netherlands, but Secretary of State Maxime Verhagen reached an agreement with Lukashenko just days before their departure. The fate of these important projects is left to the haphazard quality of bilateral contacts. On this problem UN has written not one syllable.