Word: selidovkin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Days later, Dr. George Selidovkin, a radiation specialist at Moscow's Hospital No. 6 who had been part of the Chernobyl medical team, arrived in Brazil after receiving an urgent plea from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. The ten most severely irradiated patients, dressed in protective clothes, gloves, boots and caps, had already been flown aboard a military plane to the Marcilio Dias naval hospital...
...Selidovkin began by examining the patients' blood samples to determine how many of their infection-fighting white blood cells had been destroyed and the extent of genetic damage. By comparing the results to those from previous nuclear accident victims, the Soviet doctor determined that four of the patients had been exposed to about 600 rads, a degree of radiation absorption equivalent to 4,000 chest X rays. Technicians sprayed six of the patients with cold water and scrubbed them with soap to remove any cesium from their skin. In an attempt to cleanse their bodies of any cesium they might...
Gale arrived in Rio on Oct. 17. By then some of the patients' radiation- ravaged bone marrow could not produce sufficient immune cells to fight off ever present bacteria. Doctors battled soaring fevers, infection and internal bleeding with sophisticated antibiotics and clotting agents. At Chernobyl, Gale and Selidovkin had tried to save severely affected technicians and fire fighters with bone-marrow transplants. The medical team in Rio decided against that surgical tactic, in part because the patients' bone marrow had not been irreversibly destroyed and because, from the nature of their exposure, some of the sickest patients had become radioactive...
...Chernobyl, you had a nuclear fire that at the first stage affected the technicians in the plant," noted Selidovkin. "But there was no cesium 137 introduced into their bodies. Here the irradiation was both incorporated and local." Leide das Neves Ferreira, 6, who had eaten a cesium-tainted sandwich, continued to emit 25 rads a day, even after repeated efforts at decontamination. At that rate, the radioactivity in her body was destroying her bone marrow before it could produce white blood cells...
| 1 |