The Chernobyl catastrophe and population health: the state of knowledge in 1993.

This review describes the history and organizational structure of the Ukrainian Research Center for Radiation Medicine, which has studied the health effects of the Chernobyl incident since 1986. In five years of observation, the percentage of people defined as "healthy" was reduced by 1.6-2.2 times, and the general frequency of disease increased by 2.6 times. The most common disorders seen were of the pulmonary, central nervous system, circulatory and gastrointestinal systems. The observed medical effects of radiation from Chernobyl are greater than might be expected, given the estimates of radiation dose released. This discrepancy may result from an underestimation of the radiation dose or a failure to account for compounding the interaction with factors other than radiation. Ongoing surveillance of the consequences from the Chernobyl accident must take place to provide new information on the health effects of accidental radiation exposure in humans.