Young Chernobyl victims heal in Cuban sun

by Anthony Boadle

TARARA, Cuba, (Reuters)

At a beach resort near Havana, children with bald heads and skin lesions splash with joy in the warm Caribbean sea.

They are victims of radiation fallout from the worst civilian disaster of the nuclear age -- the 1986 power plant explosion in Chernobyl -- and are in Cuba for treatment.

"I want to stay here," says Sveta, a blue-eyed 15-year-old from Ukraine's capital Kiev whose eyelashes are beginning to grow back.

Since 1990, communist Cuba has treated free of charge 18,000 Ukrainian children for hair loss, skin disorders, cancer, leukaemia and other illnesses attributed to the radioactivity unleashed by the reactor meltdown years before they were born.

Up to 800 children travel to the Tarara Paediatric Hospital each year for at least two months, accompanied by parents or tutors. Some stay for years. They live in bungalows built as beach houses by rich Cubans before Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.

Most get treatment for hair loss, spending 15 minutes a day under an infra-red light after a lotion made from human placenta is applied to their heads. Hair grows back in 60 percent of cases, said Dr. Giraldo Hernandez.

Many children suffer from vitiligo, a patchy loss of skin pigmentation, which is treated with another placenta-based lotion and lots of sunlight on the beach. Psoriasis is also common.

More serious cases of cancer require chemotherapy or surgery. Six leukaemia patients have received bone marrow transplants in Cuba.

While some disorders, such as the 30-fold increase in thyroid cancer among Ukrainian children, are directly linked to the Chernobyl accident, scientists do not know whether hair loss is caused by radioactive pollution or post-traumatic stress.

FUN IN THE SUN

Recreation in the tropical sun is as much a part of the cure as the medical treatment, Cuban doctors say.

Baldness is particularly difficult to bear for adolescent girls painfully aware of their looks, some of whom arrive in Cuba wearing wigs.

Playing on Tarara's palm tree-lined beach, they soon shed their complexes and recover a joy for life and personal goals, said Hernandez.

"It helps. We sit under the infra-red lamp and they put a lotion on our heads. Then we go to the beach," said 16-year-old Alina Petrusha from Zaporozhe, in southeast Ukraine.

She began to lose her hair when she was 8 and has spent a total of 2-1/2 years at Tarara since 2001. Wearing jeans and tank top, three rings on an ear, glitter lip gloss and eyebrows painted on with a makeup pencil, Alina says she and her friends love to go dancing at Tarara's disco at night.

"My hair starts to grow here, but when I go home I lose it again," she said.

CUBAN SOLIDARITY

Havana began helping Chernobyl children when Ukraine was a Soviet republic and communist ally. The programme was maintained after Soviet communism collapsed, plunging Cuba into deep economic crisis from which it has not recovered.

Cuba has never revealed the cost of the programme, which Ukrainian officials estimate at some $300 million to date.

"Like no other country Cuba held out a helping hand at a very difficult moment. We suffered an immense catastrophe and needed help for the most valuable thing any nation has -- its children," said Raisa Moinsenko, a Ukrainian Health Ministry official.

Many of the children are orphans or come from poor families that cannot afford medical treatment in Ukraine, where public health care has deteriorated since the demise of the communist state and private medical care is expensive.

The radioactive contamination from Chernobyl will take decades to break down and genetic defects among Ukrainian children are expected to continue occurring for years.

Tania Syomka from Zaporozhe flew to Cuba a year ago with her crippled daughter for an operation to treat a deformation of her spine that she could not pay for at home.

"Now Irina can do everything she wants, go to the beach and the disco. She is a tall and very pretty girl now," Syomka said.

The longest resident at Tarara, Vladimir Zaslaski, could not walk when he arrived 11 years ago suffering from a progressive neurological movement disorder. His spasms ended after Cuban neurosurgeons operated.

"This comes from Chernobyl. Thanks to Cuba I began to walk a year ago," the 21-year-old said.