Yes, indeed.


[snip]

Preface

Dr. Bandazhevsky’s groundbreaking research on the effects of radioactive cesium upon the children and people of Belarus is not well known in the United States. This is in large part because the government of Belarus chose to persecute him and suppress his work, which threatened to disrupt their plans to repopulate lands grossly contaminated with radioactive cesium. Bandazhevsky was forced to write this study while under house arrest, awaiting many years of subsequent imprisonment and torture. Government agents had already destroyed many of the archived samples, slides and materials that he and his colleagues and students had accumulated during the nine years he was Rector of the Gomel State Medical Institute of Belarus. However, Bandazhevsky had already published much of the statistical data he had obtained in 4 books: Clinical and experimental aspects of the effects of incorporated radionuclides in the body [Russian and English]. Gomel 1995; Pathophysiology of incorporated radioactivity. Gomel, 1997; Structural and functional effects of radionuclides incorporated into the body, Gomel, 1997. Pathology of incorporated radioactivity, Minsk, 1999, as well as numerous articles in the collection of scientific works of the Gomel State Medical Institute. He used much of this previously published information in conjunction with the slides that he had preserved at his residence, in order to write this study. For purposes of clarity, I have added a section, at the bottom of page 6, which provides more details on the methodology used by Dr. Bandazhevsky to obtain Whole Body Counts and the specific activity of 137Cs (cesium-137). This section on methodology is taken from “Chronic Cs-137 Incorporation in Children’s Organs,” published in Swiss Med Wkly 2003; 133:488-490. Dr. Bandazhevsky was the author, but note that he was in prison at the time, and the 2003 study was compiled by his European colleagues using data that they had obtained from Dr. Bandazhevsky during their visits to the Gomel State Medical Institute during the period 1997-1999. Dr. Bandazhevsky has recently confirmed to me that that the methodology described in the 2003 study did in fact describe the methodology used during his nine year research recorded in this study.
Steven Starr, March, 2013