Doctors call for termination of IAEA agreement

World Health Assembly to renounce IAEA agreement

13/04/2011

The physicians' organization IPPNW calls on the German government to submit an application to the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May with the aim of ending the 50-year-old World Health Organization (WHO) agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the consequences of radioactive radiation. „WHO must be able to work and act independently in its work on the dangers of radioactivity. ...

She does not do that yet. Human health should once again become the primacy of WHO“, IPPNW's long-standing chairman Dr. Angelika Claußen to the Environment Committee today at a public session on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl.

In the May 1959 agreement with the IAEA, WHO committed to doing so, „before starting a research program or a measure“ on the consequences of radioactive radiation, „to consult the IAEA in order to settle the issue by common agreement“. But the IAEA's main purpose, according to the statute, is to promote the use of atomic energy. A contradiction that can not be resolved.

Among other things, the agreement leads to WHO downplaying the health consequences of the Chernobyl disaster and not publishing documents on the risks of nuclear technology. In their official statements, IAEA and WHO even manipulate their own data. At the September 2005 of „Chernobyl Forum of the United Nations“ There was serious discrepancy between the press release, the WHO report and the underlying sources, which was produced under the auspices of the IAEA and the WHO on the consequences of Chernobyl.

The latest publication by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) at the end of February does not support the numerous results of the Chernobyl consequences from the three countries concerned. Only a total of 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents as well as leukemia and lens opacities in liquidators are taken into account. UNSCEAR even comes to the conclusion, „that there is no reason for the vast majority of the population to fear the serious health consequences of the Chernobyl accident“.

This macabre downplaying of numbers mocks the victims of the radiation-contaminated zones in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, as well as across Europe, where 53% of Chernobyl radioactive fallout fell. According to a recent study by the IPPNW and the Society for Radiation Protection, more than 100,000 people have already died from the Chernobyl consequences. (Pm)

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