Title: Immigrants from Chernobyl-affected areas in Israel: the link between health and social adjustment
Author: L.I Remennick
Reference: Social Science & Medicine Volume 54, Issue 2, January 2002, Pages 309–317
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(01)00030-2
Keywords: Israel; Chernobyl; Radiation exposure; immigrants (from Chernobyl-affected areas); Cumulative adversity, health effects, social adjustment
Abstract: The concept of cumulative adversity is a useful tool in the study of migration under chronic stress from past traumas. Drawing on this concept, the study explored long-term health and psychosocial effects of past radiation exposure among survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster who immigrated to Israel during the 1990s. Self-rated health status and indicators of social adjustment were compared in two groups of Russian immigrants: 180 persons from Chernobyl-affected areas and 200 immigrants from other areas of the former USSR. The semi-structured questionnaire was administered by Russian-speaking sociology students and analyzed by both quantitative and qualitative methods. In line with earlier research, both the somatic and mental health of Chernobyl survivors were significantly worse than in other immigrants of the same gender and age; a significant share of reported health problems were probably psychosomatic. Depression, sense of stigma and cancer-related anxiety were more prevalent in the study group. Immigrants from contaminated areas tended to use more health services (both conventional and alternative), but were less satisfied with their quality and providers’ attitude. The link between perceived health impairment and poorer social accommodation in the host country has been confirmed: Chernobyl-area immigrants experienced more severe occupational downgrading and were more disappointed with the results of their resettlement than other immigrants.
URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953601000302
http://www.impact.arq.org/doc/kennisbank/1000011072-1.pdf
Title: Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city
Author: Paul Dobraszczyk
Reference: City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Volume 14, Issue 4, 2010, pages 370-389
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.496190
Keywords: Chernobyl, urban apocalypse, industrial ruins, representation, cinema
Abstract: This paper offers a reading of urban ruin through a personal experience: a visit I made to the Chernobyl site in October 2007—first to the destroyed reactor and then to the ruined buildings of Pripyat, using my own photographs as documents. The paper situates this experience in the context of wider representations of technological ruin and the city. Pripyat may not be a city, let alone a metropolis, but its scale as a ruin is unique in the post‐war period. In the West, the ruined city usually only presents itself in fictive representations: that is, in literature and film and not in the flesh, so to speak. Experiencing the ruins of Pripyat may invite thoughts about the value, or otherwise, of industrial ruin; its unprecedented scale invites an altogether different meditation on the ruin of the city as a whole and perhaps, too, of civilisation itself.
URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2010.496190#.Ub6JDthLOM0
Title: Chernobyl: Living with risk and uncertainty
Author: Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace, Professor Matthias Beck
Reference: Health, Risk & Society , Volume 8, Issue 2, 2006, pages 105-121
DOI:10.1080/13698570600677167
Keywords: Nuclear accidents, risk society, biographical disruption
Abstract: The nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986 is a dramatic example of the type of incidents that are characteristic of a ‘risk society’. The consequences of the incident are indeterminate, the causes complex and future developments unpredictable. Nothing can compensate for its effects and it affects a broad population indiscriminately. This paper examines the lived experience of those who experienced biographical disruption as residents of the region on the basis of qualitative case studies carried out in 2003 in the Chernobyl regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Our analysis indicates that informants tend to view their future as highly uncertain and unpredictable; they experience uncertainty about whether they are already contaminated, and they have to take hazardous decisions about where to go and what to eat. Fear, rumours and experts compete in supplying information to residents about the actual and potential consequences of the disaster, but there is little trust in, and only limited awareness of, the information that is provided. Most informants continue with their lives and ‘do what they must’ or even ‘what they like’, even where the risks are known. They often describe their behaviour as being due to economic circumstances; where there is extreme poverty, even hazardous food sources are better than none. Unlike previous studies, we identify a pronounced tendency among informants not to separate the problems associated with the disaster from the hardships that have resulted from the break-up of the USSR, with both events creating a deep-seated sense of resignation and fatalism. Although most informants hold their governments to blame for lack of information, support and preventive measures, there is little or no collective action to have these put in place. This contrasts with previous research which has suggested that populations affected by disasters attribute crucial significance to that incident and, as a consequence, become increasingly politicized with regard to related policy agendas.
URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698570600677167#.Ub5-XdhLOM1
Title: Memories, commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl: Introduction
Author: Melanie Arndt
Reference: Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam; Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Anthropology of East Europe Review 30 (1) Spring 2012
Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy, memories, commemoration, Belarus
Abstract: This special issue of AEER is dedicated to memories, commemoration practices, and representations of Chernobyl. The idea for the issue was born during the final conference of the international research project “Politics and Society after Chernobyl” in Potsdam, Germany, in April 2011.The conference took place barely a month after the tsunami and the following nuclear accidents in Japan and just a few weeks before the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
URL:http://scholarworks.dlib.indiana.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/viewFile/2009/1959
Title:Chernobyl Stories and Anthropological Shock in Hungary
Author: Harper, Krista M.
Reference: Anthropological Quarterly. Jul2001, Vol. 74 Issue 3, p114-123. 10p.
Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, Anthropological Shock, Hungary
Abstract: The Budapest Chernobyl Day commemoration generated a creative outpouring of stories about parental responsibilities, scientific knowledge, environmental risks, and public participation. ! examine the stories and performances elicited by the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1996. In these “Chernobyl stories” activists criticized scientific and state paternalism while engaging in alternative practices of citizenship. The decade between the catastrophic explosion and its commemoration coincides with the development of the Hungarian environmental movement and the transformation from state socialism Chernobyl Day 1996 consequently became an opportunity for activists to reflect upon how the meaning of citizenship and public participation had changed in those years as well.
URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/toc/anq74.3.html
Author: F.M. Gaiduk, S.A. Igumnov, V.B. Shal’kevich
Reference: Социальная и клиническая психиатрия (Social and clinical psychiatry), 1994
Abstract: Well-known article among experts. However, there is no detail of it on web.
Author: Loganovsky K N, Kovalenko A N, Yuryev K L, Bomko Maria A, Antipchuk Ekaterina Yu, Denisyuk N V, Zdorenko Leonid L, Rossokha A P, Chorny A I, Dubrovina G V
Reference: Український медичний часопис (Ukrainian Medical Magazine), 2003
Keywords: organic brain damage, clinical neuropsychiatric, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging surveys
Abstract: The problem of verification of organic brain damage in remote period of acute radiation sickness (ARS) is of a great significance due to the radiovulnerability of the brain is still at issue. The goal of the study was to verify the organic brain damage in remote period of ARS by clinical neuropsychiatric, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging surveys of cerebral structural and functional abnormalities. The endophormous (apathetic) postradiation brain organic syndrome (encephalopathy) is compressed by microfocal neurological signs, personality disorders, negative psychopathological symptoms, depression and cognitive deficit. The structural and functional brain damage involving the frontal lobes and the left temporal lobe together with their cortico-subcortical connections and deep brain structures were revealed by neuropsychological investigation. There were dominating EEG-patterns as follows: the disorganized with predominance of a- and big spectral power of slow activity EEG-pattern and low-voltage polymorphous EEG-pattern with predominance of d- and b-power. Atherosclerotic changes, hypertensive vessel tonus, interhemispheric asymmetry of blood supply (decreased in the left hemisphere), as well as high frequency of stenos were the causes of cerebral haemodynamics disorders. Brain structural pathology revealed by magnetic-resonance imaging, predominantly, brain atrophy, enlargement of ventricula, and lacunar brain abnormalities, supported the cerebro-organic nature of the disorders. Thus, the organic brain damage in remote period of ARS has been verified by clinical neuropsychiatric.
URL: http://www.umj.com.ua/article/1029/verifikaciya-organichnogo-urazhennya-golovnogo-mozku-u-viddalenij-period-gostroi-promenevoi-xvorobi
Author: M.O. Bomko
Reference: dissert.cand.med.sci., Kiev, 2005
Keywords: remote period, organic brain damage, MR, ARS
Abstract: The current work is in the frame of the government’s complex project for the liquidation of the aftermaths of Chernobyl and social protection of people, in the field of neurology. Purpose of the study: To identify structural and functional cerebral bases in remote period of exposure in the dose range 0,05-4,7 Sv and to verify organic brain damage in the Chernobyl liquidators.
For the first time a quantitative analysis of MR images in the Chernobyl liquidators, including persons who have been diagnosed with ARS, with organic brain damage in remote period exposure in the dose range 0,05-4,7 Sv, is conducted.
URL: http://librar.org.ua/sections_load.php?s=medicine&id=6920
Author: M.A. Bomko
Reference: Український медичний часопис (Ukrainian Medical Magazine), 2004
Keywords: ionizing radiation, organic brain damage, magnetic-resonance imaging, morphometry
Abstract: The goal of the study was to determine the distinctive features of organic brain damage in remote period of exposure to ionizing radiation as a result of the Chernobyl accident on the basis of morphometric analysis of cerebral magnetic-resonance images (MRI). There were examined 79 clean-up workers of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident with organic mental disorders following exposure to ionizing radiation in doses of 0,14–4,7 Gy, as well as 18 non-exposed patients with organic mental disorders. Visual and morphometric assessments of MRIs have been done. Morphometry of MRI included analysis of contrast coefficients between brain structures and cerebral liquor system, sizes of lateral ventricles and the third ventricle, indices of lateral ventricles bodies, frontal horns of lateral ventricles and the third ventricle. Cortical atrophy of cerebral hemispheres and damage of neuronal pathways in the dominant hemisphere are the characteristic morphometric neuroimaging features of organic brain damage in remote period of exposure to ionizing radiation as a result of the Chernobyl accident. There was revealed the «dose–effect» relationship between the dose and the characteristic morphometric neuroimaging features of organic brain damage, starting with 0,3 Gy and increasing in proportion to the dose.
URL: http://www.umj.com.ua/article/937/morfometrichna-nejrovizualizacijna-xarakteristika-organichnogo-urazhennya-golovnogo-mozku-u-viddalenij-period-vplivu-ionizuyuchogo-viprominyuvannya-vnaslidok-chornobilskoi-katastrofi
