Nothing to See Here

On Aug. 8, the New York Times reported that Japanese officials withheld information about the scope of the nuclear disaster that struck the Fukushima Daiichi power plant this March. Computer forecasts that showed radioactive fallout billowing toward thousands of citizens who had been evacuated to the district of Tsushima were kept quiet by Tokyo in order to avoid enlarging the evacuation zone — and opening up the politically powerful nuclear industry to further scrutiny. But the coverup, which was tantamount to “murder,” according to one resident quoted in the article, is hardly the first time a government swept damning evidence under the rug in order to downplay a catastrophe.

THE CHERNOBYL MELTDOWN

When reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded on April 26, 1986, the Kremlin kept mum. It wasn’t until two days later on April 28, after a radioactive cloud had drifted across much of the Soviet Union and Europe, that Soviet officials finally broke their silence. But the coverup within the Soviet Union was longer and much more insidious. In the days following the explosion, when “everyone in the upper echelons of power knew everything,” according to a Ukrainian parliamentary commission report published in 1991, few efforts were made to evacuate people from contaminated areas. Instead, a “criminal disinformation” campaign, as it was later called by the commission’s chairman, was undertaken to persuade Ukrainians that nothing was wrong.

The town of Chernobyl, just nine miles from the reactor, was not evacuated until six days after the explosion, at which point radiation in the surrounding area had reached more than 100 times safe levels. Likewise, the district of Narodichi, 68 miles from the reactor, was still home to children until June 1986, according to Time magazine. Although only 50 people have died as a direct result of radiation exposure, according to a 2005 report by the United Nations, thousands of cases of thyroid cancer and leukemia have been linked to the disaster.

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BANGLADESH’S POISONED WATER

Up until the early 1970s, when this South Asian country emerged from its bloody war of secession with Pakistan, most rural Bangladeshis drank from rivers, lakes, and shallow wells, which were often contaminated by human waste. As a result, cholera and other diarrheal diseases were rampant. To combat the problem, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Bangladeshi government collaborated to sink millions of tube wells into deeper — and presumably cleaner — groundwater. The wells, which provided 97 percent of the population drinking water by the mid-1990s, were heralded as an unqualified success — that is, until it turned out that they had exposed between 33 million and 77 million people to arsenic. The World Health Organization deemed the resulting tragedy, “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history … beyond the accidents at Bhopal, India, in 1984, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.”

Because arsenic is usually found in regions with rocky or volcanic deposits and not in the silty soil typical of the Ganges river delta, the wells were not tested for the element before becoming operational. But critics of the UNICEF program maintain that the Bangladeshi government was aware of the arsenic problem well before the reports of the widespread contamination emerged. In particular, scientists have claimed that government officials knew that Bangladeshis were crossing the border into India to seek treatment for arsenic poisoning as early as 1985, according to the Guardian.  

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CHINA’S SARS OUTBREAK

In 2003, the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China became an international controversy when it emerged that Chinese officials withheld information that, according to medical experts, might have saved lives and stopped the rapid spread of the disease. The whistle-blower, a retired army surgeon by the name of Jiang Yanyong, circulated a letter to the international press in April claiming that seven people had died and 106 people were being treated in Beijing hospitals for the life-threatening virus. At the time, Chinese officials had acknowledged only a fraction of that number of cases for the country as a whole. The debacle, which drew harsh criticism from the World Health Organization, eventually led to the sacking of Chinese health minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong.

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THE GREAT OLYMPIC CHINESE MILK DEBACLE

In December 2007, a Chinese dairy company called Sanlu began receiving complaints that its baby formula was making infants sick. Six months later, it got around to testing the formula, and two months after that it finally reported to the government of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hubei province, that its product was contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine. By this time it was August 2008, however, and China was in the midst of putting on a good show, hosting the Beijing Summer Olympics. Not wishing to break the bad news while it was the center of the world’s attention, Chinese officials sat on the report for the next six weeks.

By the time authorities recalled the formula from the market in mid-September, it had made 53,000 infants sick and caused four deaths. The incident also dealt a serious blow to China’s dairy industry. Production was virtually halted for testing between September and November of that year, and rumors about the extent of the contamination depressed dairy product sales across Asia. The industry has since recovered, however, and grown at an annualized rate of 10 percent since then.

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SWINE FLU SCANDAL

The spring of 2009 saw the arrival of a new and deadly strain of swine flu (H1N1) that swept across the globe, eventually claiming some 10,000 lives. But before it was declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) — the first in 41 years — a number of governments attempted to cover up the scale of H1N1 outbreaks inside their borders. Britain, as Alan Sipress noted in these pages, cooked its books by counting only those subjects who had traveled to countries with confirmed outbreaks, though it already had a sizable outbreak of its own. Mexico — the source of the virus — was accused of an early coverup, as was Spain, which also withheld swine flu information from a worried public.

Why all the government artifice? The answer, unsurprisingly, is money. Flu outbreaks almost always lead to financial woes, as concerns about the spread of illness lead to drops in tourism, tighter export controls, and reduced consumer spending. Mexico, for example, lost $3 billion as a direct result of the 2009 H1N1 scare, according to John Berry, a distinguished scholar at the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research.

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