On Saturday, April 26th, 1986 at 1:23 am, Block 4 of the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl exploded. The plant was located approximately 100 km north of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, near the border with Belarus. 180,000 kilograms of highly radioactive material is inside the reactor at the time an amount equal to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. About 1019 Bq of radioactive material – consisting of at least...

Background: Suicide is one of the main causes of premature mortality in Belarus, brining considerable losses of human lives. There is strong evidence of a crucial role of alcohol in explanation of high suicide rate and its profound fluctuations over the past decades in this country. The aim of this study was to examine the relation between the overall alcohol consumption and suicide mortality r...

The history of Russian-Belarusian integration is a strange history indeed. Throughout the whole decade ever since 1995, the two countries have engaged in a highly publicized series of diplomatic exchanges about their commitment to the Union state between each other, and ever-closer union it were to be in political, economic and military spheres. Yet despite all public declarations and the expan...

Analysis of germline mutation rate at human minisatellites among children born in areas of the Mogilev district of Belarus heavily polluted after the Chernobyl accident has been extended, both by recruiting more families from the affected region and by using five additional minisatellite probes, including multi-locus probe 33.6 and four hypervariable single-locus probes. These additional data c...

Non-native species can cause negative impacts when they become invasive. This study entails a comparison of risk classifications for 25 aquatic non-native species using various European risk identification protocols. For 72% of the species assessed, risk classifications were dissimilar between countries. The pair-wise comparison of Freshwater Fish Invasiveness Scoring Kit (FISK) scores of in to...

V. P. Markevich,1 A. R. Peaker,1 S. B. Lastovskii,2 L. I. Murin,2 J. Coutinho,3 V. J. B. Torres,3 P. R. Briddon,4 L. Dobaczewski,5 E. V. Monakhov,6 and B. G. Svensson6 1School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester M60 1QD, United Kingdom 2Scientific-Practical Materials Research Centre, NAS of Belarus, P. Brovka Str. 19, Minsk 220072, Belarus 3I3N, Univer...

Simplified dynamic models have been developed for predicting the concentrations of radiocaesium, radiostrontium and I in surface waters and freshwater fish following a large-scale radioactive fallout. The models are intended to give averaged estimates for radionuclides in waterbodies and in fish for all times after a radioactive fallout event. The models are parameterised using empirical data c...

BACKGROUND It is well recognized that both acute and chronic alcohol use are among the major behaviorally modifiable factors that are associated with suicidal behavior. There is suggestive evidence that binge drinking pattern, i.e. excessive consumption of strong spirits results in quicker and deeper level of intoxication, increasing the propensity for alcohol-related suicide. Although alcohol ...

S. Yoshida, Y. Muramatsu, M. Steiner, M. Belli, A. Pasquale, B. Rafferty, W. Rühm, A. Rantavaara, I. Linkov, A. Dvornik and T. Zhuchenko National Institute of Radiological Sciences, Anagawa 4-9-1, Inage-ku, Chiba, 263-8555 Japan Federal Office for Radiation Protection, Institute for Radiation Hygiene, 85764 Oberschleißheim, Germany National Environmental Protection Agency, Via Vitaliano Brancat...