‘I studied near Chernobyl 25 years ago, now I have terminal cancer’

CATRIONA Munro was studying in Minsk when the Chernobyl nuclear plant was hit by a series of explosions in 1986.

Twenty-five years on, she believes her terminal breast cancer may be linked to the fall-out from the disaster and is trying to trace fellow students to investigate whether any have also become ill.

Ms Munro, 46, who lives in the Black Isle, was one of a number of language students from universities across the UK studying Russian in Belarus, in the former USSR, at the time.

Although she has been told there is no proof her cancer was due to radiation exposure, she wants to find out if others have suffered the same fate as her.

Her quest is highlighted in a BBC documentary tomorrow, which says the collapse of the Soviet Union meant no definitive research was carried out into the effect of the Chernobyl disaster on human health.

Ms Munro recalls she was sunbathing on the roof of the student hostel some 250 miles away from the plant when an explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, which spread over much of western USSR and Europe.

She said she was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

“It wasn’t until about three days later that the news that there had been a massive explosion leaked out.”

She says she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in August 2008: “That’s when the word ‘Chernobyl’ came back into my life. It was mentioned by certain people in the medical establishment that it could possibly have a link to my cancer.

“No-one can say for sure whether there’s a link between my illness and the Chernobyl disaster. But suddenly, I wanted to know much more about the impact of radiation on human health. I also wanted to learn what happened to my fellow students, whose health I knew nothing about.”

She added: “It’s easier to forgive an individual crime than a collective one, particularly if the repercussions of the individual crimes reverberate on yourself.

“When fate catches you up in an external event involving money, power and universal controversy, it is gratifying to stand back and point to a collective blame. When I was diagnosed at the age of 43 with incurable breast cancer in a cancer-free family, I was tortured by a Greek chorus of every venal moment throughout my life when I succumbed to nicotine, alcohol and food, added to stress, nastiness and transgression of various of the Ten Commandments. But was this all linked to a 25-year-old event?”

The programme says that estimates of the death toll from Chernobyl still vary wildly, ranging from 50 to one million.

That has led to calls for a new long term study, similar to comprehensive research into the health effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is still going on.

Professor Keith Baverstock, who led the World Health Organisation’s radiation protection programme for more than ten years, believes new research is vital.

He said: “There’s the next generation to think of. There’s some evidence that a kind of mutation has been passed down to future generations and we don’t know what the health consequences of this are, so we have to study that.”

The BBC Scotland documentary Fall Out, will be on BBC 2 Scotland on Sunday at 6:30pm.