Chernobyl fall-out 'killed city babies'

Analysis of health statistics in areas where "black rain" clouds passed over - including Bradford - in the wake of the Soviet reactor blast suggest the "shock" trend which has gone unnoticed for 20 years, a conference heard today.

Epidemiologist and statistician John Urquhart told a conference of local authorities on nuclear hazards at London's City Hall that the disaster could have caused more than 1,000 infant deaths in Britain.

He said maps of where the fall out passed and plans highlighting apparent irregularities in death figures showed a "remarkable fit".

He said that in Bradford neonatal deaths - that is deaths within the first 28 days of life - appeared to have doubled from 33 to 64 in the year of the disaster.

Similar trends were detected elsewhere in the country.

Official maps show a cloud swept up through Kent and London, into Hertfordshire and the East Midlands before curving round Bradford and into the North West and passing over the Isle of Man towards Northern Ireland.

Looking at health figures for around 200 hospital districts, Mr Urquhart said there was an 11 per cent rise in infant deaths between 1986 and 1989 as opposed to a figure of just four per cent in non-affected areas.

As well as national variations, there were also very noticeable regional differences, he said. Yorkshire received hardly any radioactive fallout, apart from the very far west, and infant deaths in Bradford were higher than in the rest of the county.

He said the apparent rise - taking in both neonatal fatalities and cot deaths - translated to more than 1,000 deaths when social factors were borne in mind.

"Traditionally, children under one have always been most sensitive to environmental influences," he said.

But Mr Urquhart added that the apparent trend had not been noticed before because of over-reliance on scientific models rather than observation.

He said that models in use in 1986 had persuaded decision-makers that the impact of fall-out from Chernobyl on the British Isles would be too small to detect.

"No one has really looked at this problem for 20 years," he said. "If you compare it to infant deaths in Hiroshima, we are taking about one per cent but unfortunately a lot of our models are based on Hiroshima, so you wouldn't pick up the infant death statistics."

Clinical director of Bradford Teaching Hospitals Dr John Wright, who heads Born in Bradford, a ground-breaking project designed to improve the health of children, said he was "extremely sceptical" about Mr Urquhart's findings.

"My initial view would be caution," he said. "I would need to take a closer look at the evidence before making a rash judgement.

"The causation of infant mortality is extremely complex."

A report is due to be published in the summer from the Bradford District Infant Mortality Commission.

The commission has just spent a year examining why Bradford has the second highest morality rate among under-ones in the country, after Birmingham.

Back in August 1988, the Telegraph & Argus was reporting that radiation levels in the Skipton area were to be checked after it was revealed that an area of heavy rainfall in the area immediately after the disaster had been missed.

A year after the incident, the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food admitted it had missed the hotspot where heavy rain fell as the cloud passed over.

And in 1989, Bradford Council checks for radioactivity in the district were proving negative.

In the previous 12 months, honey samples from hives in the Aire and Wharfe valleys as well as soil samples in Thackley and Haworth had all come back within safety limits, the district's environmental health department was reporting.

In 1988, the T&A reported new figures which put Bradford's infant death rate for 1986 as the worst in the country.

Nationally, the average death rate for babies in 1986 was 9.6 per 1,000 births, but Bradford's was a shocking 18.1 per 1,000.

And the district's rate had leapt to that figure from 10.4 per 1,000 for 1985.