Russian rocket-launch site makes local children ill, study finds

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="4" face="Arial">Russian rocket-launch site makes local children ill, study finds</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial"><font size="1">Posted Jan. 12, 2005<br> Courtesy Nature<br> and World Science staff</font> <b> <font size="2" face="Arial"><br> <br> </font> </b> </font> <b><font face="Arial" size="2">One of the world’s busiest rocket-launch pads, which is also the historic home of the Russian space program, is making children who live near it seriously ill, a study has found.</font> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2">The site, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, is the lift-off point for many missions to the International Space Station. It is also the complex where Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite, was launched, as was the rocket that carried Yuri Gagarin, the first human in orbit.</font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2">The new study found that children living near the site – in an area polluted by rocket fuel – were twice as likely to need medical attention during the years 1998 to 2000 as children living in an unpolluted area nearby.</font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2">The children in the contaminated area also needed treatment for twice as long as the others, the study found. The study is not itself published, but its findings are discussed in a news story in the Jan. 13 issue of the research journal <i>Nature</i>.<o:p> </o:p> </font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2">The cosmodrome is a source of considerable income for the Russian government, which makes up to $25 million per launch there, according to an estimate published in the journal. However, Russia has tried in the past few years to move more launch activities to a station on its own territory, Plesetsk, because of disputes with Kazakhstan, which took over the Baikonur facility after the Soviet Union fell.</font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2">Baikonur, opened in 1957, isn’t used only for the Russian space program. NASA and European Space Agency also use the site. Most recently, it was used last month to launch a spaceship that delivered food and supplies to U.S. and Russian space travelers after a food shortage had forced them to start rationing. </font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2">The researchers, from the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Novosibirsk, Russia, said the highly toxic fuel falls on sparsely populated Russian regions close to Baikonur. Other major bases used by NASA and the European Space Agency, such as Cape Canaveral in Florida, send rockets out over the sea. This presumably reduces the direct impact of pollution to humans. </font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2">The study examined health records of some 1,000 children in two polluted areas for 1998-2000, comparing them with 330 records from a nearby unpolluted area.</font></p> <font face="Arial" size="2">An accompanying editorial in the journal suggests that NASA and the European Space Agency  take some responsibility for investigating the study findings further.</font> <p><font size="2" face="Arial"><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/world-science">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/world-science</a></font></p> </b> </body>