SARZHAL (Kazakhstan): Aiguerim Chynbergen was born four years after the last nuclear tests in then-Soviet Kazakhstan, but the radioactive fallout blamed for crippling her still poisons her village.

“It is hard for me to walk for too long. I can’t even do housework,” said the 14-year-old, who suffers from a congenital double hip deformity that condemns her to a life indoors. “I can’t go to school anymore.” Aiguerim’s family lives 20 kilometres from the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, where the Soviet military tested about 500 atomic bombs between 1949 and 1991.

Together with other Soviet former republics, Kazakhstan turned its nuclear arsenal over to Russia when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, but the decades of testing left a grim legacy: chronic disease in villages like Aiguerim’s, where the 2,000 inhabitants can rarely afford treatment even when it is available.

“The dispensary only provides drugs for emergencies and the hospital was closed in 1991,” said paediatrician Laura Medetkyzy, who works in Aiguerim’s village, Sarzhal.

The most serious diseases are blamed on the 160 bombs exploded above ground before 1962.

“People have deformities, cancers, anaemias, cataracts, renal diseases, pulmonary or cardiac” problems, Medetkyzy said. “It is rare that anyone here lives beyond 60.”Radioactive fallout is only part of the grim legacy of Soviet planning mistakes in Central Asia. Another is the rapidly vanishing Aral Sea, which lies between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and was devastated by decades of pollution and poorly conceived irrigation projects.

And the fallout of nuclear testing is not limited to a few small villages.

Dangerous radiation levels here affect some 1.2 million people, nearly ten per cent of Kazakhstan’s population, according to the official figure.

“For this population, cases of cancers are 300 to 400 per cent above” average, said Boris Galich, the top state expert and the deputy manager at the Institute of Radiation of Semipalatinsk, a government-run treatment and research facility.

This is partly blamed on meagre government funds and -- critics say -- insufficient official attention to the victims’ suffering.

But according to Galich, correctly identifying those made sick from radiation and those from other unrelated causes is not simple.—AFP