- GENEVA (Reuters) - Swiss scientists said on Friday they and international
colleagues were urgently trying to find out what caused a sudden sharp
rise in levels of radioactivity in Switzerland and neighbouring France
at the beginning of June.
-
- The unexplained surge on June 1 and 2
was not thought to pose a health risk, but it was the highest level in
the 12 years since 1986's Chernobyl nuclear disaster, said Heinz Surbeck,
deputy head of the Swiss radioactivity surveillance office.
-
- The contamination, borne on southern
winds, might have been caused by fallout from the Chernobyl disaster reintroduced
into the environment, or a possible accident, he said.
-
- As of Friday, Surbeck said radioactivity
levels were back to normal from levels over 1,000 times above normal in
early June.
-
- But he said recent French media reports
about the radiation surge had caused a health scare in Switzerland.
-
- ``We've been getting many calls from
the public -- pregnant women calling to say they're scared for their babies
and people asking if it's okay to go to Ticino for holiday,'' said Surbeck,
referring to the Italian-speaking southern Swiss canton.
-
- ``But we hope it's all over now,'' he
told Reuters. The Swiss pride themselves on their clean environment and
good air quality. The mountainous country has set up a vast network of
radioactive monitoring since Chernobyl.
-
- Gennady Sushkevich, a medical doctor
at the environmental health office of the World Health Organisation, said
the levels were not dangerous and too low to contaminate the food chain.
-
- Surbeck said the contamination was caused
by Caesium-137, which he said was the ``signature'' of Chernobyl and may
suggest fallout from it. But he said the levels were 10,000 times below
the concentration released by the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine on
April 26, 1986, the world's worst nuclear disaster.
-
- The ensuing radioactive cloud poisoned
vast areas in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and drifted over parts of Western
Europe.
-
- In May, France's independent CRII-RAD
laboratory said it found high levels of Caesium-137 high in the Alpine
mountains of Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland and called for regular
monitoring of water and food for possible contamination.
-
- Scientists were mystified by the unexplained
surge. ``The French are working very hard to find the source. Until they
find the source, everybody will be nervous,'' said Manfred Hoefert, an
expert at the European Particle Physics Laboratory CERN on the French-Swiss
border.
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- Possible sources could include a nuclear
reactor, an accident or burning of a Caesium-137 source -- used for medical
and industrial purposes -- that may release it into the air.
-
- Surbeck said samples taken showed radioactivity
levels in southern France of 1,000 to 2,000 microbequerels per cubic metre
detected by filters in place for one day.
-
- Those findings and Swiss surveillance
pointed to similar high levels in Switzerland early in June, he added.
The normal level is between two to three microbequerels per cubic metre.
-
- The southern side of the Alps were affected
more than the north as the contaminated cloud hovered there after winds
blew the radioactivity from south or southwest of Switzerland -- anywhere
from southern France or Italy to north Africa.
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