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Background: Environmental public health disasters involving hazardous contaminants may have devastating effects. While much is known about their immediate devastation, far less is known about long-term impacts of these disasters. Extensive latent and chronic long-term public health effects may occur. Careful evaluation of contaminant exposures and long-term health outcomes within the constraints imposed by limited financial resources is essential. Methods: Here, we review epidemiologic methods lessons learned from conducting long-term evaluations of four environmental public health disasters involving hazardous contaminants at Chernobyl, the World Trade Center, Bhopal, and Graniteville (South Carolina, USA). Findings: We found several lessons learned which have direct implications for the on-going disaster recovery work following the Fukushima radiation disaster or for future disasters. Interpretation: These lessons should prove useful in understanding and mitigating latent health effects that may result from the nuclear reactor accident in Japan or future environmental public health disasters.

The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine produced severe environmental health problems. This paper reports on the environmental health conditions in Ukraine after the accident and the health policy approaches employed to respond to the environmental conditions and health problems. Crisis conditions and a period of rapid change in Ukraine contributed to the difficulties of developing and implementing policy to address serious environmental health problems. Despite these difficulties, Ukraine is taking effective action. The paper describes the primary environmental health problem areas and the efforts taken to solve them. The effect of intense public fear of radiation on policymaking is described. The paper discusses the ability of public fear to distort health policy towards certain problems, leaving problems of greater importance with fewer resources. 35 refs., 1 fig.

Background After the Chernobyl nuclear accident on April 26, 1986, all children in the contaminated territory of the Narodichesky region, Zhitomir Oblast, Ukraine, were obliged to participate in a yearly medical examination. We present the results from these examinations for the years 1993 to 1998. Since the hematopoietic system is an important target, we investigated the association between residential soil density of 137Caesium (137Cs) and hemoglobin concentration, and erythrocyte, platelet, and leukocyte counts in 1,251 children, using 4,989 repeated measurements taken from 1993 to 1998. Methods Soil contamination measurements from 38 settlements were used as exposures. Blood counts were conducted using the same auto-analyzer in all investigations for all years. We used linear mixed models to compensate for the repeated measurements of each child over the six year period. We estimated the adjusted means for all markers, controlling for potential confounders. Results Data show a statistically significant reduction in red and white blood cell counts, platelet counts and hemoglobin with increasing residential 137Cs soil contamination. Over the six-year observation period, hematologic markers did improve. In children with the higher exposure who were born before the accident, this improvement was more pronounced for platelet counts, and less for red blood cells and hemoglobin. There was no exposure×time interaction for white blood cell counts and not in 702 children who were born after the accident. The initial exposure gradient persisted in this sub-sample of children. Conclusion The study is the first longitudinal analysis from a large cohort of children after the Chernobyl accident. The findings suggest persistent adverse hematological effects associated with residential 137Cs exposure.