Eighteen years after Chernobyl, Finns should still be wary of mushrooms

Finns, who on average consume nearly 1.5 kilos (3.3 pounds) of wild mushrooms a year, should continue to take precautions when eating some types of fungi due to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 18 years ago, officials said. In April 1986 a nuclear reactor at Ukraine's Chernobyl power plant exploded and spewed equivalent radiation of over 200 Hiroshima bombs into the air, contaminating large parts of Europe, including southwestern Finland. "There are no mushrooms that people should not eat, but we emphasize that in some regions, making up just 20 percent of our total land area, people should still take some precautions when eating certain types," Aino Rantavaara, a researcher with the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, told AFP. She recommended boiling mushrooms and then discarding the water, which typically removes between two-thirds and 90 percent of radioactive materials such as Cesium 137. While the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is the largest such accident so far in history, it only accounts for one percent of the total annual radiation Finns are exposed to, the remainder coming from natural background radiation, she said.