(Fukushima Aftermath) Interview: Tokyo covers up cancer-Fukushima link: professor

Just like what happened after the Chernobyl tragedy, increased thyroid cancer cases have appeared among children living in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, a leading Japanese expert told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"But the Japanese government has been totally unprepared for the situation," said Toshihide Tsuda, professor of environmental epidemiology at Okayama University.

The rate of thyroid cancer children in Fukushima prefecture in Japan was as much as 20 to 50 times higher than the national average as of 2014, three years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Tsuda said.

The number will almost certainly increase with the passage of time, according to Tsuda's findings published in the electronic edition of the journal of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) late last year.

However, the Japanese government denied the link between the disease and the nuclear accident.

When the study was published, Tsuda said, he and other researchers appealed to the government to adopt proper measures to address the issue, but their findings not only fell on deaf ears of the central and prefectural governments but also met with doubt and criticism.

Though admitting a high incidence of thyroid cancer in children, the Fukushima prefecture government denied the correlation between those cases and the nuclear accident, and attributed the phenomenon to "over-diagnoses" or much more stringent monitoring.

However, Tsuda pointed out that the magnitude of the incidence is too great to be explained by increased screening or "over-diagnoses," since available data show that enhanced screening could at most lead to a 6-to-7-fold increase in incidence.

On Jan. 22, the ISEE sent a message to the Japanese government, expressing concerns about an increase in the risk of thyroid cancer among Fukushima residents.

It also urged the government to develop a series of measures to scientifically document and track the health of Fukushima residents, and expressed its willingness to support related investigations by utilizing the expertise of its members.

In response to the letter, Japan's ministry of environment said that "documenting and tracking the health of the residents" are among the measures the prefecture has already adopted.

"The Japanese government did not directly respond to the ISEE's offer, actually, it chose to ignore it," said Tsuda.

The government should correct its attitude and face up to the problem, said the professor. Endi