Thyroid Cancer and the Chernobyl Accident

The accident at nuclear power plant number 4 at Chernobyl in the northern Ukraine took place on April 26th 1986. Within 4 years increasing numbers of cases of thyroid carcinoma in children were being reported from the areas around Chernobyl, and that reported increase has continued. An EC supported consortium to study the pathology and molecular biology of the thyroid cancers is being coordinated from Cambridge. We have now studied the pathological findings in about 400 cases of thyroid cancer in children from Belarus, the Ukraine and the Russian Federation, and investigated the molecular biological findings in about 100 cases, partly from fresh and partly from fixed tissues. The findings have been correlated with the age and sex of the children, and with their residence at the time of the disaster, and compared to a study of thyroid carcinoma in children from England and Wales over a 30 year period (1).