NEW YORK, August 5. /TASS/. Hospitals of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Japan are still providing medical assistance to thousands of those who survived the 1945 atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also to their children, the ICRC said in a report, published on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the first-ever cases of wartime use of nuclear weapons.
As follows from the document, from March 2014 to April 2015 4,657 patients underwent treatment at the hospital for the survivors of the Hiroshima atom bombing. Two-thirds of them proved to have cancer diseases, mostly cancer of the lungs, stomach, liver, and intestines, and also leukemia and lymphoma.
At the end of the twelve-month cycle ending March 31 the hospital of the Japanese Red Cross Society Genbaku in Nagasaki provided assistance to 6,030 officially registered atom bombing survivors as out-patients and 1,267 others in hospital, the report says. Also, there were nearly 24,000 house calls to the children of atom explosion survivors, which confirms the fears regarding the effects on health in the second generation.
As representatives of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) said, humanity is obliged to derive lessons from the first-ever and so far only case of wartime use of nuclear weapons. According to ICAN chief Beatrice Fihn, around the world there are still about 15,000 nuclear warheads and the risk of their detonation was growing with every passing day.
On August 6, 1945 US bomber B-29 Enola Gay dropped a four-tonne uranium bomb codenamed Little Boy on Hiroshima. The explosion instantly killed an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people. The overall number of fatalities exceeded 140,000. Three days later, in the morning of August 9, 1945 another B-29 bomber dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 70,000 and razing the city to the ground. Over years the radiation sickness claimed another 152,000 lives.