Chernobyl Newborns at Risk
                          From 1986 Reactor Blast

                              by Laureen Fagan
                             19 September 2000


     JERUSALEM (Reuters) -- Babies born now in Chernobyl face as great
     a risk of radiation-related illnesses as the children who lived
     there when a nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, Israeli experts
     said on Tuesday.

     Research conducted by Israel's Selikoff Centre for Environmental
     Health and Human Development showed that the longer children
     stayed in the Chernobyl area in Ukraine, the more likely they were
     to become ill.

     The results of the study were released at a news conference by the
     Hassidic Jewish Chabad movement's Children of Chernobyl project,
     which marked the arrival of the 2,001st Jewish child it has
     brought to Israel from the region in the last 10 years.

     "Not only are children at risk, but every day they stay in the
     Chernobyl area, that risk increases," said Jay Litvin, medical
     liasion for Chabad. "We literally consider ourselves to be in a
     race against time."

     Most of the children brought to Israel from affected areas in
     Belarus, Ukraine and Russia arrive without their parents. But the
     movement said they were later reunited and families usually stayed
     in Israel.

     Mikhail Gechtin sent his children on the first Chabad flight to
     Israel in 1990.

     "We didn't know what happened," he said of the Chernobyl accident.
     "We were out parading for May Day and no one said anything."

     Later, when Gechtin measured radiation around his home he was
     afraid for his family and sent his son and daughter to Israel and
     later joined them.

     "I felt that I came from hell," Gechtin said. "For me, the sooner
     I got them out of there, the better."

     The medical study found that infants and children in the Chernobyl
     area were as much at risk now as youngsters were at the time of
     the disaster because their rapidly developing cells were
     especially vulnerable to radiation.

     "Radiation is very insidious," Litvin said. "It can enter the
     body, mutate cells and lie dormant, slowly doing its work."

     The report studied 1,080 children brought to Israel since 1990.

     Dr Yogesh Choudhri, chief epidemiologist for the study, found
     thyroid, liver and other diseases more prevalent than in unexposed
     children. A high incidence in breast cancer was also found in
     young women who were exposed to the radiation as girls.

     The Chernobyl disaster exposed more than three million children to
     radiation.

     A U.N. report in April said the worst health effects were yet to
     come and radiation levels would remain high until the middle of
     the century.