A doctor who treated survivors of a mysterious nuclear accident in Russia was told that the radioactive isotope cesium-137 must have made its way into their body due to “Fukushima crabs,” according to CNN.
The August 8 incident at the Nyonoksa testing range on a platform in the White Sea has not yet been fully explained, but at least seven individuals have been reported dead after what nuclear agency Rosatom described as an accident involving an “isotope power source for a liquid-fuelled rocket engine.” It later emerged that the incident was serious enough that Russian officials in Arkhangelsk wavered over the issue of whether to issue evacuation orders for nearby towns. While several of the personnel deaths were due to an onsite explosion, the Washington Post reported this week (citing the Novaya Gazeta newspaper) that two individuals had died of radiation exposure before they could be taken to Moscow for treatment.
Radiation levels in the nearby city of Severodvinsk spiked to 16 times background levels, according to the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, which is a level not expected to have consequences for human health.
According to the Post report, medical workers at a regional hospital were not informed that three patients who arrived after the accident had possibly been exposed to radiation. One source said that after cesium-137 was detected in an emergency room, doctors and nurses using only face masks for protection had to decontaminate the room. They were later forced to sign nondisclosure agreements stating that any information about the incident is a state secret, the Post wrote.
The local health ministry blamed the detection of cesium-137 in one doctor’s body on food, according to CNN:
Despite the doctor’s exposure to patients from an area where a short-term radiation spike was recorded, the local health ministry blamed the trace amounts of the isotope on bad seafood.According to Meduza, a Riga-based investigative outlet, health officials told the doctor the cesium-137 detected was likely related to a recent vacation to Thailand. An employee at the hospital said that the health officials told the doctor, “You just ate Fukushima crabs there”—referring to a series of meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011 following the catastrophic Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. While some cesium-137 has been detected in oceanic wildlife, most of the scientific community believes it has been diluted to levels unlikely to impact human health.
“Cesium-137... has the feature of accumulating in fish, mushrooms, lichens, algae,” the statement posted on the local government’s website reads. “With a certain degree of probability, we can assume that this element got into the human body through the products of food.”
https://gizmodo.com/russian-health-officials-blame-fukushima-crabs-for-cesi-1837541107