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Why we need to remember disasters like Chernobyl, April 26, 1986
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I attended my first AIDS conference in Eastern Europe as my mother’s guest. She is a physician specializing in infectious diseases.
It was April 1986, during my spring break. At the time, I was yet to decide what I wanted to do in my life, but I wasn’t planning to follow in my parents’ footsteps to study medicine. By then, all I knew about AIDS was the Rock Hudson story and his “before” and “after” AIDS diagnosis pictures splashed all over magazines like Paris Match and the like.
I remember sitting on the couch in my room, in my parents’ apartment. I was flipping through the glossy pages of Paris Match and opened it right in the middle. On the left page, a young and handsome Rock Hudson displayed the star-like smile everybody knew. The page on the right displayed the portrait of a gnawed-faced actor, with gloomy eyes and looking ten times older. What kind of disease could do this to a person, seemingly in no time at all?
That particular April afternoon I sat next to my mother in the amphitheater room at the University of Medicine building with no idea what I was getting myself into.
“What do you think?” Mom asked several hours later, after the conference was over.
I looked at her and all I could say was, “Interesting.”
I didn’t know, then, that at the time I was attending the AIDS conference, a Los Angeles man was being diagnosed with AIDS and given only months to live. His name is Joel Rothschild and I was to meet him almost two decades after he had been given the grim death sentence.
Only days after attending the AIDS conference, Chernobyl happened and plagued most of Europe, transforming many people’s lives in the worst way possible. It disturbed ours, too.
We found out about the explosion from a center in Western Europe (I believe it was one of the Scandinavian countries), which found out about the accident and made it public. It all happened in the week before Orthodox Easter, when most people clean, cook, bake and work from dawn to sometimes dusk to get ready for the holiday.
In the middle of it all, water was turned off for many days. Fresh market products became unusable including those products people bought for their food preparations. Milk, vegetables and fruits found their way to the trash. Picnic plans were canceled, although some people still went through with their already scheduled outdoor activities and enjoyed stretching on the irradiated grass.
TV and radio did not offer much information about the explosion, about what had really happened to those working at the nuclear plant or how many of them were dead or how we could stay safe. At school, teachers were trying to share some advice “in case a nuclear bomb” was coming over us—like, for example, “lie down flat on the street, by a sidewalk, and the wave of radiation will pass right above your body”! With the media forced to present the effects of the catastrophe as “nothing to worry about,” many people had to learn more practical information through the grapevine, through word of mouth and people who had some realistic idea about the reality of the disaster.
Shortly after the Chernobyl accident, oncology centers, especially those at the border with the (then) Soviet Union, filled with patients. Cancer survivors were getting sick again, especially children and the elderly.
Meanwhile scientists kept busy measuring the levels of radiation in the grass, in food and in people. In no time, really, every layperson became an “expert” in reading and interpreting the radiation tests. Also, everybody proclaimed that they were the ones who knew what had really happened.
Stories started to spread like a plague, while the few and selected individuals who knew the grim reality and its implications, and the toll we were to pay during the decades to come, had no choice but to keep quiet, silenced by an administration of terror and oppression, by a government that would accept nothing else but pure perfection, utopia, even if it was all a fakery.
In the midst of these events, the AIDS conference became kind of a blur. Little did I know then that the impact of that conference was going to follow me across an ocean and two continents, and guide me along both my professional and personal life.
