More people hospitalized in Ukraine following toxic substance dispersion

The number of people treated for exposure to toxic substances from a phosphorus fire in Ukraine now exceeds seventy, officials said a day after a train loaded with the chemical derailed and caught fire. About half of those affected, including nineteen children, were hospitalized following exposure to the smoke. Emergency department spokesman said their lives were not in danger.

Scientists say that concentrations of phosphorus residue in the air over two of the affected region’s fourteen villages, Anhelivka and Lisove, remained 23 times higher than normal. Late Wednesday Ukrainian officials said that the concentrations over the villages had decreased dramatically in a matter of hours and were within the range considered safe. “It has dispersed. We cannot explain processes in nature,” said a Nature Ministry spokesman. Zofia Kubrak, a chemistry and toxicology specialist at Lviv Medical University, contended that such a drastic decrease was impossible in light of the weather conditions. “We have neither wind nor rain in the region. That just couldn’t have happened,” Kubrak told AP. “It is a very serious accident which can have unpredictable consequences for people,” she said. Kubrak said that some people in the Lviv region complained of discomfort in the throat and mouth, which she said were typical symptoms of phosphorus poisoning. Phosphorus compounds are chiefly used in fertilizers, although they are important components of pesticides, toothpaste, detergents as well as explosives and fireworks.

The train, traveling from Kazakhstan to Poland, derailed near the city of Lviv, not far from the Polish border, and 15 of its 58 cars overturned. Six of the tankers caught fire and a cloud of smoke from the burning phosphorous spread over a 35-square mile area. The highly toxic substance, which can catch fire spontaneously on contact with air at temperatures higher than 40 C (104 F), can cause liver damage if consumed. Of the 11,000 people living in the contaminated area, 815 were evacuated. Media reports said that other people had left the villages amid health fears.

Suspicion of government resassurances regarding safety is one of the lingering effects of the 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then a Soviet republic. Moscow kept the world’s worst civilian nuclear accident under wraps for days and played down the disaster long afterward.