Posted by David Sherman on Friday, March 26, 2004 at 1:52PM :
In Reply to: OT motorcycle riding in Cernobyl posted by fletch on Friday, March 26, 2004 at 11:31AM :
I like the lady's way of writing too. I imagine if something like that happened in this country there'd be no way they'd let anybody in. Kind of neat that she can just ride in there and look around. At least with a dosimeter she knows what she's getting exposed to, which is smarter than the bunch of guys I once saw in California riding dirt bikes and quads all over an abandoned asbestos mine, breathing clouds of dust.
Here's wierd thing about Chernobyl. I was living in Seattle and my sister was a nurse at Children's Hospital. They get most of the babies from the northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska) that are born with serious birth defects that need tricky surgery. At one point they had quite a few babies all with a very rare heart defect that the nurses had never seen before. Over the course of a couple months there were something like a dozen babies with this defect. After that, there were no more cases. The cardiologist who operated on them (successfully) said that he had never seen a case of that before in his career, but in the medical literature that particular heart defect was known to be caused by the mother being exposed to nuclear radiation during the first trimester of pregnancy. All these babies were born 6-9 months after the Chernobyl fire. Later I found an article in the London Economist magazine that showed a map of Chernobyl fallout measure over North America. The fallout came from the NW and was highest in Alaska, second highest in Washington, and so on. Funny that even though government scientists were measuring the fallout in this country, nobody saw fit to mention it in the news. I now have my own gieger counter and will do my own checking if something like that happens again.
Follow Ups: