The women living in Chernobyl's toxic wasteland - Telegraph

The women living in Chernobyl's toxic wasteland - Telegraph:

'via Blog this'

One refrain I heard often was, 'Those who left are worse off now. They are all dying of sadness. ’What sounds like faith may actually be fact. According to reports by the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund, many of those who were relocated after the accident now suffer from anxiety, depression and disrupted social networks, the traumas of displaced people everywhere.

And these conditions seem to have health effects as real as those caused by radiation. The journalist Alexander Anisimov, who spent his career studying the self-settler community, claimed that the women who returned to their ancestral homes in the zone outlived those who left by a decade.

No health studies have been done, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the babushkas die of strokes rather than any obvious radiation-related illnesses, and they have dealt better with the psychological trauma. Toxic levels of strontium and cesium in the soil are real, but so are the tug of the ancestral home and the health benefits of determining one’s own destiny.