Two weeks after Legasov’s death, the Soviet minister of health delivered the opening address of an international conference on the medical consequences of the accident, convened in Kiev and attended by representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization (WHO). For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by
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