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Ten years after Chernobyl: The Rise in Strontium-90 in baby teeth (1997)

Author	Roland Schulz, Jay M.Gould, RPHP
Date	1997
Classification	2.34.8.25/05 (CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT - CONSEQUENCES REST WORLD - GENERAL)
Front

Ten Years After Chernobyl:
The Rise of Strontium-90 In Baby Teeth
By Dr. Roland Scholz
The Otto Hug Radiation Institute, Munich

Introduction
By Jay M. Gould
Director, Radiation and Public Health Project, New York

In 1996, the Berlin branch of the International Physicians for the Prevention of 
Nuclear War (IPPNW) published a remarkable document entitled Four Years ... Ten 
Years After Chernobyl: An Attempt at An Assessment by Dr. Roland Scholz, of the 
Otto Hug Radiation Institute in Munich, for which the New York Chapter of 
Physicians for Social Responsibility, a sister organization to IPPNW, has agreed to 
distribute in a partial English translation.
The report is remarkable for several reasons. First, it offers a stunning assessment 
of the true health effects of the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union after 
10 years which will come as a great surprise to most Americans. Second, it offers 
an astonishing account of the health effects of nuclear fallout from Chernobyl in 
Germany. Third it offers some evidence of the adverse health effects of low-level 
radiation from German nuclear reactors. It documents the fact that an ongoing 
analysis of the strontium-90 content of the deciduous teeth of German children born 
in 1987 had-because of Chernobyl fallout-risen ten-fold over that of children born in
1985. This finding has sobering implications for those of us who have been 
concerned with the health effects of fallout from even the routine operations of 
military and civilian power reactors.
As Director of an American non-profit epidemiological research agency which, like 
the Otto Hug Radiation Institute, has been moved by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 
to study the health effects of nuclear fallout since 1988, I can state why we have 
embarked on a similar study of the strontium-90 (Sr-90) content in baby teeth of 
families living near nuclear reactors in the New York Metropolitan area, which 
according to reports of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, have been exposed to 
the highest levels of per-capita emissions of strontium-90 in the US. (l)
In January 1989 my radiologist colleague, Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, of the University 
of Pittsburgh Medical School, and I published the first account, based on official US 
monthly mortality reports, that Chernobyl radiation arriving here in the second week 
of May 1986 was associated with a statistically significant increase in US mortality 
in the four month period May to August. (2)

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