To rehabilitate life after Tchernobyl.

This article is a survey of the difficult daily life of the people living in a small town 70 km away from Chernobyl. The local authorities have to cope with first, the global aging of the population due to the massive departure of young families in 1991 when the first cases of thyroid cancers broke out and secondly, the arrival of very poor people that settled in the abandoned accommodations. The preventive measures taken to limit the internal contamination of the inhabitants are difficult to implement and maintain because of the invisibility of radioactivity, the flourishing surrounding nature, time passing and the lack of danger awareness of the new inhabitants. The poor standard of population health is due to aging (cancers and cardiovascular diseases), to the impact of radioactive contamination (thyroid cancer among the young) but is aggravated by the very low standard of living (tuberculosis is spreading). The local economy collapsed when 50% of the land were banned from any farming activity because of the radioactive contamination, another important resource was the forest but today a large part of wood is unfit for being sold or used as firewood. On the other hand the management of contaminated areas has driven up the production costs. (A.C.)