{"id":87891,"date":"2023-10-17T11:41:21","date_gmt":"2023-10-17T10:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/?p=87891"},"modified":"2023-10-17T11:41:55","modified_gmt":"2023-10-17T10:41:55","slug":"87891","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/87891\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear incident in Vin\u010da that changed the course of modern medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\"><strong>The accident that was later dubbed the Serbian Chernobyl happened 65 years ago to date in Vin\u010da near Belgrade, at the Boris Kidri\u010d Institute of Nuclear Sciences. Then six of our researchers were exposed to a large dose of radiation and had to seek medical help from the Curie Institute in Paris.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">On October 15, 1958, six students and researchers were tasked with conducting experiments on Yugoslavia&#8217;s first low-power nuclear reactor, which was called the zero reactor.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">Students \u017divota Vrani\u0107 and Radojko Maksi\u0107 and technicians Rosanda Dangubi\u0107, \u017divorad Bogojevi\u0107, Stjepo Hajdukovi\u0107 and Dra\u0161ko Gruji\u0107, all in their twenties, were engaged in the experiment.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">Around noon things started to go very wrong when uncontrolled radiation in the reactor hall started to leak with the zero reactor working at a power a billion times higher than the envisaged one.\u00a0 As a result, six researchers were exposed to an extreme amount of radiation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">Less than 24 hours later, six irradiated scientists were airlifted to the Curie Institute in Paris for urgent medical treatment.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">There, they received experimental bone marrow transplant therapy performed by Dr. Georges Math\u00e9 and thus became the first people in the world on whom this procedure was successfully performed. The first person to receive bone marrow transplant therapy was Radojko Maksi\u0107, followed by other patients.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">Everyone survived except for \u017divota Vrani\u0107, who managed to turn off the reactor in Vin\u010da, but in the process, was exposed to an excessive amount of radiation, which his body was unable to cope with.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">An oncologist who once hosted Dr. Georges Math\u00e9 in Serbia, Professor Vladimir Kov\u010din, PhD, says that the transplants were successful by sheer luck because the doctors did not yet have all the required knowledge to perform them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">&#8220;For transplantation, you have to have a certain donor and at that time, we had no idea that the donor must be genetically related to the recipient. The bone marrow transplants were done only based on blood groups and gender, while the rest was only found out later,&#8221; says Professor Kov\u010din.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">Before the bone marrow was transplanted to Radojko Maksi\u0107, Dr. Math\u00e9 did the procedure only on rats.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">&#8220;Dr. Georges Math\u00e9 did those experiments with the intention of finding a way to treat people who were irradiated after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings or to treat people in the event of a nuclear war. That was one of his goals,&#8221; Professor Kov\u010din adds.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">&#8220;Those who are lethally irradiated die because they do not produce white or red blood cells or the platelets that serve to stop bleeding anymore and die either from infection or internal bleeding,&#8221; explains Professor Kov\u010din.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">This revolutionary bone marrow transplant therapy by Dr. Math\u00e9 later became one of the main methods of treating various types of leukaemia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">Professor Kov\u010din goes on to say that Dr. Math\u00e9 helped Yugoslavia a lot during the economic sanctions in the 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">&#8220;During the sanctions (against Yugoslavia), when we didn&#8217;t have sufficient medication or anything else for that matter, Dr. Math\u00e9 brought medicines and cytostatics in trucks when it was not possible to import these medicines into Yugoslavia. Thanks to his international connections, he managed to supply us with medicines for the most seriously ill patients, those suffering from cancer,&#8221; concludes Professor Kov\u010din.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">Dr. Georges Math\u00e9 died in 2010, on October 15, the day of the accident in Vin\u010da. Today, the Oncology Department at the Be\u017eanijska Kosa Clinic and Hospital bears his name.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\">(Danas, 17.10.2023)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.danas.rs\/vesti\/drustvo\/kako-je-akcident-u-vinci-pre-65-godina-promenio-istoriju-svetske-medicine\/\">https:\/\/www.danas.rs\/vesti\/drustvo\/kako-je-akcident-u-vinci-pre-65-godina-promenio-istoriju-svetske-medicine\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The accident that was later dubbed the Serbian Chernobyl happened 65 years ago to date in Vin\u010da near Belgrade, at the Boris Kidri\u010d Institute of Nuclear Sciences. Then six of our researchers were exposed to a large dose of radiation and had to seek medical help from the Curie Institute in Paris. On October 15, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":87892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.serbianmonitor.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}