Revolutionary care: Castro's doctors give hope to the children of Chernobyl

[Demeter]

Eleven-year-old Olga enters the beach house in flip-flops, her hair still wet from a dip in the Caribbean. "I really like it here," she says. "The food is great, the beach is awesome. I made some fantastic friends."

A typical child's reaction to a beach holiday, perhaps – only this is no ordinary seaside break. Olga is a Ukrainian "Chernobyl child", in Cuba not for a holiday but to undergo intensive medical treatment with some of the country's best doctors. She goes to school along with 180 other Ukrainian children. "I miss some bits of my home town," she muses. "But I don't ever want to leave."

Olga is one of more than 18,000 Ukrainian children to have been treated over the years at the Tarara facility near the Cuban capital, Havana. The programme was set up in 1990 to treat the victims of the world's most devastating nuclear accident four years earlier.

A steady procession of children with bald heads, skin lesions and other malformations have since benefited from splashing in the clear blue Caribbean waters. Twenty-three years after Chernobyl, the Cuban programme is still going strong. Remarkably, children born years after the disaster still suffer physical consequences of the meltdown that irradiated large parts of Ukraine and Belarus; equally remarkably, despite isolation and economic miasma, Cuba still manages to tend to them...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/cuba-chernobyl-health-children?CMP=ema_565

[sharp_stick]

1. That is an excellent story

and yet the Russians still refuse to acknowledge the death toll of the nightmare that was and is Chernobyl.

[Demeter]

2. While US Nuclear fans refuse to acknowledge Chernobyl AND Fukushima

and the dangers in the US and everyone else's reactors...

[sharp_stick]

4. You are absolutely right

Everybody claims to know the "safe" way to do this but it's a load of crap.

[Mnemosyne]

3. I take issue with the wording of the last sentence of the snip in OP, when it states, "Remarkably,".

How remarkable is it to have such illness and deformities a couple decades after the second worse nuclear disaster in history? Seriously?

I would go to Cuba for medical care if ever possible. I remember when Michael Moore took the 9/11 responders there for care. They were treated so well.

[Demeter]

5. That's an acknowledgement of the US ability to forget

because we are always enjoined to "look forward". History is the one subject we have failed repeatedly for the past.....how many years?