Survival Manual: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future - Nuclear Disaster Preparedness Book for Emergency Readiness & Historical Study

I am an environmental engineering professor at a major research university and I've read about everything I can find on Chernobyl. Most of what's available describe the accident and the immediate cleanup, The accident itself is tragic enough with many people being exposed to high levels of radiation and suffering acute radiation sickness. This book, and two more I've recently read, describe the aftermath, 10 and 20 years later. Until about 1990, it was forbidden for physicians to attribute sicknesses to radiation exposure. As a result, the population living around Chernobyl were exposed to varying amounts of radiation, particularly through contaminated food. Therefore many people, unaware of contamination, received varying, long term exposures with different health effects. Contamination was hard to predict because of the complicated patterns of winds and rain during the releases. The lack of scientific controls and data, along with government secrecy means that cause and effect relationships that epidemiologists expect to find are obscured. As a result the deaths and injuries attributed to Chernobyl are small, limited to the trauma deaths during the reactor accident and the deaths due to acute radiation exposure. This book tells the story of the following events where many citizens of Ukraine and Belarus suffered chronic, life-shortening diseases, usually with inadequate diagnosis and support. The author also describes the activities of various international organizations, particularly the IAEA, to determine the health effects and their causes. She implies that these agencies biased their findings on thyroid cancer because of fears that elevated findings would open new investigations of other exposed populations. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Chernobyl and the final history of the Soviet Union. It's a good read.