> Telling the population the border is safe knowing it's not and then they get cancer is quite factual.
It's not so clear cut. Thyroid cancer rates started increasing dramatically almost everywhere in the world in the mid 80's. Diagnosis rates in the US for example have tripled since 1980, in South Korea they have gone up 13x since 1993. Meanwhile the mortality rate has been completely flat. The most likely cause of this is increase in both screening and the sensitivity of testing [1]. There is also a current debate about if we should be screening / treating thyroid cancer the way we are, i.e. it seems like we're detecting a lot of innocuous thyroid cancers and then operating without need resulting in unnecessary life long complications for the person.
This is why there is a lot of research out there indicating that the vast majority of the increase in thyroid cancer diagnosis in areas like France is unrelated to Chernobyl.
It is worst than this, of course, because some plants accumulate radioactivity and we ate them. No recommendation had been given to the general population at all.
The region with the most thyroid cancers in the 20 years following is the Isère, at the center east of this map.
Now let's say we end up calculating that the actual number of cancers is, let's say, 100 more in France because of the cloud. It would not be much, and would not be worth acting on it: the flu would be more dangerous.
It's not so clear cut. Thyroid cancer rates started increasing dramatically almost everywhere in the world in the mid 80's. Diagnosis rates in the US for example have tripled since 1980, in South Korea they have gone up 13x since 1993. Meanwhile the mortality rate has been completely flat. The most likely cause of this is increase in both screening and the sensitivity of testing [1]. There is also a current debate about if we should be screening / treating thyroid cancer the way we are, i.e. it seems like we're detecting a lot of innocuous thyroid cancers and then operating without need resulting in unnecessary life long complications for the person.
This is why there is a lot of research out there indicating that the vast majority of the increase in thyroid cancer diagnosis in areas like France is unrelated to Chernobyl.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5745