Germany’s Epidemiological Data on Cleft Lip and Palate After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Accident: A Systematic Literature Review
Claas Willem Molsen, Pascal Grün, Christian Philipp Schnell, Flora Turhani, Sebastian Fitzek, Marius Meier, Dritan Turhani · 2026
Read Germany’s Epidemiological Data on Cleft Lip and Palate After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Accident: A Systematic Literature Review by Claas Willem Molsen, Pascal Grün, Christian Philipp Schnell, Flora Turhani, Sebastian Fitzek, Marius Meier, Dritan Turhani (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13600118.txt.
Description
Whether fallout from the Chernobyl accident raised rates of cleft lip and palate in Germany has been argued for decades. Claas Willem Molsen and six co-authors reviewed the German evidence in a 2026 systematic review. They searched three databases and judged the quality of what they found with a standard risk-of-bias tool.
From 276 records, only six studies passed the screen. Studies from Bavaria and the former East Germany reported links between higher cleft rates and the accident in some regions. No study measured the radiation dose of any single child; all worked from regional averages. Regions with lighter fallout showed no clear difference. One study put the extra dose in the worst-hit areas at about 1.2 milligray. The authors warn that such group-level data cannot prove cause for any one case.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Claas Willem Molsen, Pascal Grün, Christian Philipp Schnell, Flora Turhani, Sebastian Fitzek, Marius Meier, Dritan Turhani |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 58 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |