Cancer-stricken youngster Misha Kozlov has never heard of the Chernobyl disaster.
But the radioactive cloud that engulfed his parents’ home 30 years ago has blighted his short life.
Aged only four, he has just completed several courses of chemotherapy and has had a huge tumour removed from his leg.
Misha is from the East European region that was worst affected by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown on April 26 1986.
Red-eyed with emotion and fatigue, his mum Elena, 35, says: “I think Misha’s cancer is very probably caused by radiation.
“In our town there are a lot of children who have cancer and I think it is because of radiation, but what can you do.”
She shrugs, resigned to her family’s awful fate. In the busy Children’s Cancer Hospital in the Belarussian capital Minsk, her story is typical.
Scores of mums and dads whose kids are patients were children themselves when the worst nuclear disaster in history stunned the world.
Now their offspring are developing rare cancers. Although no one will say officially, there is widespread fear that radioactive poison is being genetically passed on to the next generation.
Cancer figures in Belarus, which sits between Poland, Russia and Ukraine, rocketed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then tailed off.
But last year there was an increase of nearly 20% in child cancer cases.
In the Children’s Cancer Hospital the corridors are full of shaven-headed children with leukaemia awaiting bone marrow transplants.
Others are struggling under the intense treatment regime for thyroid cancer, which in most other countries affects very few under-18s.
The hospital’s normal capacity is 180, but there are currently 200 children here.
Elena, an accountant who was five when her country was engulfed in a toxic cloud, said: “In my friend’s family there was another girl who had brain cancer. She died aged 15."
Minsk Children's Cancer Hospitall: The children being treated at the hospital have been born to parents who were kids themselves when the disaster hit
“I have been living at this hospital with Misha since October last year, which has been a real struggle.
“Coming to terms with your little boy having a tumour is not easy. I am not angry about the radiation though. There is no point. It is all around us and we cannot move away.”
Belarus, part of the old Soviet Union when the Chernobyl plant caught fire and exploded, bore the brunt.
In the path of the prevailing wind that devastating day, it took 70% of the fallout from the stricken power plant. A fifth of the country’s agricultural land was contaminated.
The overall effect on future generations isn’t known yet.But experts say only 10% of overall problems caused by radioactive isotopes like the Caesium-137 that drenched parts of Belarus will be seen in the first generation.
By 2050, experts estimate new debilitating health problems will emerge. And the lethal substance will pollute around Chernobyl for up to 320 years.
A map of Belarus shows dark purple hotspots of ongoing intense radiation in the south of the country.
Back in 1986, the Communist authorities did their best to dampen fears while the power station was still ablaze and spewing out radiation.
Misha Kozlov is aged 4. Misha's family says they are not angry about his cancer as there is nothing they can do.
People like Elena’s parents stayed at home, oblivious to the danger. Today some villages around the city of Gomel, which lies just over the border from Chernobyl in northern Ukraine, are abandoned.
Another patient at the children’s hospital is Yvgeny Revtovich, whose dad Dmitri was born the year after the explosion and grew up in Gomel.
A poignant birthday balloon is tied to Yvgeny’s bed. He turned six last Tuesday.
“Yvgeny has leukaemia,” factory worker Dmitri explains.“I will never know for sure whether it is radiation that has caused his sickness because no one tells us. Obviously it is very strange that so many children from our town have leukaemia.”
Yvgeny may be lucky. A bone marrow donor has been found for him in Germany.
In the same ward five-year-old Anya Kastrova does circuits on a tricycle but her mischievous giggle disguises the gravity of her condition.
Anya has a sarcoma – a rare cancer that develops in multiple parts of the body.Her mother, also Elena, 37, said: “I am almost sure it is from radiation.” Another girl, Veronica, 13, darts about, cuddling younger kids.
She was found to have a tumour in her stomach at the orphanage where she had been abandoned by her alcoholic parents.
Others, slowed down by having to walk while still attached to a drip, are visibly dazed by strong medication.At the hospital the tale emerges of another woman from Gomel whose child mysteriously developed thyroid cancer even though she had been living in Russia, 10 hours drive away, for the last 15 years.
Her little boy, whose dad is from India, became ill when they went back to Gomel to visit relatives.
Suspicion immediately falls on radiation. Meanwhile families at the hospital have been provided with pre-fabricated cabins to live in while their children are have treatment.
Funding for these vital homes has come from a small British charity, Chernobyl Children’s Project.
The organisation was set up by Linda Walker, from Glossop, Derbyshire, in 1995.It provides a lifeline for hundreds of youngsters whose lives have been scarred by radioactive fallout.
Linda said: “It is 30 years since Chernobyl but the children of Belarus need our help as much as ever. Many of the children in the care of our Home Hospice team in Gomel have genetic disorders.
“Although not all will be linked to Chernobyl, there has been a very significant rise in the numbers of children born with genetic disorders.
“There has definitely been an increase in brain and spinal birth defects because of Chernobyl.”
Invisible in the soil, the slowly-decomposing particles of radioactive waste from Chernobyl are still stalking their innocent victims.
Re: Is The Fukushima Radiation Being Blown Out of Proportion?
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Areas to the south of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. WBC measurement were performed at the Jyoban Hospital in central Iwaki, which is located about 50 km south of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Study subjects were mainly hospital visitors from Iwaki and its suburbs. 
Monthly visitors and those with detectable levels of 137-Cs (detection limit 250 Bq/body). 
Two children among the 6,446 children examined showed Cs-137 contamination levels that were over the detection limit, but Cs-134 levels were found above the detection limit. 
Of the 2,760 adults examined, 35 (1.26%) had very low levels of Cs-137 contamination. Cs-134 levels were below the detection limit. 
Orange County Health Care Agency / AP
) are less susceptible to radiation than others, (as well as the matter of individual health, evidently there are lots of different sources of DNA currently evolving on the planet with different strengths and susceptibilities). 
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