I feel for her struggle, but this is disinformation.
She starts with the false claim that the Chernobyl disaster "killed hundreds of thousands of people". UNSCEAR (the IPCC of radiation) puts the death toll at 50 people, + 6000 thyroid cancers for those who were children at the time (due to radioactive iodine sticking on the thyroid) [1]. This is why folks who live near a nuclear power plant are given iodine pills: to saturate the thyroid so it doesn't use the radioactive one. This mostly useful for children.
She then attributes her defects on mutations originated from radionuclides induced DNA damage. Unfortunately there is no way to verify that claim, since there is no discernible health effect under 100mSv/year, which her parents definitely were not exposed to since they were in England.
Anecdotal, my wife and I became parents to a beautiful baby girl in September last year. Our lil girl was diagnosed with heart disease, and ultimately we discovered she has a rare genetic disorder called Kabuki syndrome. She has many other morbidities, turns out Kabuki affects multiple systems, heart, kidney, hearing, spine, hips, endocrine, etc. We live in Gary, IN. A few years ago there was a spill in Lake Michigan from one of the steel mills. I was in the water on/around the time, because the alarm wasn't raised for a few days. My child's condition is so rare, that it took me a while to comprehend really how rare. I questioned whether the two are related. There have been studies about respiratory issues (asthma, heart disease, etc.) near steel mills. I run a local website to track our air pollution https://millerbeach.community, wish I was able to track drinking water in real-time, because drinking the same water discharged from steel mill sounds horrific.
I feel that we need to collect more data and have it open in some way so that people can look for "unexpected" correlations and figure out if people in one area or exposed to one thing are unnaturally lucky in general.
I wonder if in the future one could use purchases (e.g. harmful products which we do not know they are harmful) and GPS data (e.g. exposed to environmental factors) correlated with health records to do forensic large scale analysis? Still I wonder if the signals are strong enough to show up?
It is sort of like generic trait attribution via population studies.
Thanks for sharing that, it was very powerful. I was lucky enough to be born a few years before Chernobyl, but I have a close friend who was born just after and who also has some congenital non-standard body-related "things".
Maybe it is all a coincidence, fact is many (if not almost all) of these individual stories haven't been statistically collected and analysed, it's just a "hidden continent" of very sad personal stories that will be forgotten once the affected people will no longer be alive to tell them.
She starts with the false claim that the Chernobyl disaster "killed hundreds of thousands of people". UNSCEAR (the IPCC of radiation) puts the death toll at 50 people, + 6000 thyroid cancers for those who were children at the time (due to radioactive iodine sticking on the thyroid) [1]. This is why folks who live near a nuclear power plant are given iodine pills: to saturate the thyroid so it doesn't use the radioactive one. This mostly useful for children.
She then attributes her defects on mutations originated from radionuclides induced DNA damage. Unfortunately there is no way to verify that claim, since there is no discernible health effect under 100mSv/year, which her parents definitely were not exposed to since they were in England.
[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html