Seventeen years after the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded, Irish aid campaigner Ms Adi Roche has warned that humanitarian efforts are barely addressing the true extent of the disaster.
Cork campaigner and founder of the Chernobyl Children's Project, Ms Roche was speaking on the anniversary of an event which affects over nine million people in the former Soviet Union.
"Belarus is on its knees where illness among children is rife, where infertility rates are soaring and where mortality rates are outstripping birth rates in the contaminated regions." The explosion was the "greatest environmental catastrophe in human history", she said.
"Many of those who were children at the time of the explosion are now beginning their own families and we are seeing the effects of radiation being passed to the next generation and into the gene pool as the rate of congenital birth deformities is frighteningly high. What we are witnessing in Belarus is the erosion of a nation's health."
The true extent of the disaster on human society had remained hidden, and only recently revealed with the release of secret KGB files, said Ms Roche.
"There may be confusion about the true extent of the devastation caused but what we can be sure about at this point is that countless lives in the Chernobyl region have been destroyed by death and ill-health. The release of dozens of secret KGB files this week revealed the chilling reality of what is a major cover-up.
"These files show that up to 30,000 people died in the aftermath, while the authorities up to now have admitted only 15 deaths. These files finally unmask the truer, deadly picture." Earlier this month, a convoy of over 60 ambulances carried €3 million worth of aid from Cork to Minsk, in Belarus.
Every April 26th since 1986, relatives and friends of those killed in the blast gather at a cemetery outside the Russian capital to visit the graves of their loved ones who are buried in lead coffins to protect the earth from their contaminated corpses.