But 18 years after the reactor explosion at the nuclear station in neighboring Ukraine, the warning falls on deaf ears.

Olga Baranova, a kindergarten teacher, certainly pays it no heed as she pulls on rubber boots and a violet anorak for a 70-kilometer (45-mile) trip from Minsk to the Sivitsa forest.

"Before they checked food for radiation. At first it was frightening. Now, we are used to it," she shrugged.

Olga would not take her basket to the village school's doctor, Marina Malyavskaya and her radiometer, furnished by the independent Belrad radiological security institute.

"It is true that people bring their food less often, they pay less attention. Radiation does not scare them anymore, it is not something you hear or see," even though the forest is the most contaminated area in the zone, Marina complained.

"Here the contamination levels for the mushrooms can be six times the advised norm," she added.

Sivitsa is one of many spots on a map of Belarus that mark the areas contaminated by Chernobyl and range from the yellow of lightly contaminated to the deep orange of the more dangerous areas.

On that late April day of 1986, it was raining on Sivitsa's fields, forest and painted wooden houses that were home to some 400 people.

The village awoke to find itself in a zone where radioactivity hovered between five and 15 curies per square kilometer. People were evacuated from areas where the radioactivity levels were at least 40 curies per square kilometer.

According to Belrad Institute's latest measurements in March 2004, 81 of Sivitsa's 87 schoolchildren whose levels of radioactive Cesium-137 were higher than those considered safe and none had the substance completely absent from their system.

Cesium-137 is a radionuclide produced during nuclear fission and exposure to it can result in malignant tumors, according to the website of the US government's Environmental Protection Agency.

"All children have immunity system deficiencies, frequent bronchitis, low hemoglobin levels and heart problems due to radiation," Marina said, though she stressed that the rise of cancer had not been proved to be directly linked to Chernobyl.

"Officially, only 20 percent of Belarus's children are considered healthy, and in contaminated areas, this number goes down to 10 percent," Belrad Institute's chief Vasily Nesterenko explained.

Yuri Bandazhevsky, a nuclear medicine expert who started to gather evidence that small ingestion of contaminated food could cause pathologies has been jailed on what authorities insist are corruption charges.

The authorities downplay the problem and say that in theory all food sold in Belarusian markets must be certified as non-contaminated.

"Here, milk and vegetables can be eaten without problem," Sivitsa's doctor assured, testing potatoes with his radiometer.

It is mushrooms, berries and game -- that form an important part of rural diet -- that are the worst problem, Marina added.

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