news.vice.com – Thirty years ago today, the Number 4 reactor at Chernobyl blew itself to smithereens, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster in history. A radiation cloud drifted over Europe, contaminating food sources that to this day continue to be monitored. Fifty-thousand residents in the nearby city of Pripyat were permanently evacuated. Dozens of people lost their lives.

Yet about 20 years after the disaster, an extensive two-year study led by seven UN agencies and involving the governments of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus found that the biggest health threat from Chernobyl wasn’t the result of radiation — it was fatalism. People assumed they were going to die early due to radiation exposure, and so failed to take care of themselves as years passed. Tiếp tục đọc “The Lessons of Chernobyl May Be Different Than We Thought” →