NY Times: Chernobyl Cancers showing up in New York.

[NNadir]

The disaster struck 20 years ago on the other side of the world, in a nation that no longer exists, and the memory has faded in American minds. But the legacy of Chernobyl is turning up in hospitals and clinics in New York, where it is growing.

Cancer of the thyroid gland is rising in the United States, to about 30,000 new cases a year, according to the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, and it is climbing more sharply in New York State. While there are no data on the rates among different ethnic groups, doctors who work with émigrés from the former Soviet Union say that that population accounts for a significant part of the rise, because of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Pripyat, Ukraine, on April 26, 1986...

...There is much dispute over the death toll and some of the health effects from Chernobyl. But the link between nuclear fallout exposure and thyroid cancer is well documented, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in areas of the United States and other countries that were affected by aboveground nuclear tests...

...There are about 700,000 people living in the United States who were born in Ukraine, Belarus or Russia, including close to 200,000 in New York City, and significantly smaller populations in the suburbs in both New York and New Jersey, according to the Census Bureau and the City Planning Department.

A great majority of those people immigrated after Chernobyl, and they probably account for hundreds of thyroid cancer cases a year, Dr. Branovan said. It is another lesson in how hard it is to isolate health problems in an era when people travel the world with ease and bring diseases — think West Nile encephalitis or SARS — with them...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/nyregion/20chernobyl.html