The Chernobyl Forum meeting is discussing a report by an international team of scientists that says only 56 people have so far died and 4,000 may eventually perish from radiation exposure, a toll much lower than feared from the accident.

Michael Repacholi of the World Health Organization (WHO) had told reporters Monday that there had been "speculation (of) tens of thousands of deaths, lots of cancers", but that the true toll would be far lower.

He said the "likely deaths that could occur, using good solid background of radiation research ever since the (World War II atomic) bombing in Japan, (would be) approximately 4,000 people... from cancer over their lifetime."

Kalman Mizsei of the UN Development Program (UNDP) said the death toll was so far only 56 -- 47 rescue workers who received high doses of radiation and nine children who contracted thyroid cancer.

But William Peden, a researcher for the Greenpeace environmental group, told AFP on Tuesday: "To state so boldly that only 4,000 people will eventually die from Chernobyl is ridiculous.

"It is way too early to make such bold assertions when so many questions remain unanswered and many thousands more may die in decades to come," Peden said.

Vladimir Tsalka, from the Chernobyl committee of Belarus, one of the three main countries affected by the explosion of the reactor in Ukraine, said cancer would not be the only contributor to the eventual death toll.

"Our experts predict that in the nearest future alongside the growth of thyroid cancer cases, there is high probability of increased cancer diseases as well as cardiovascular and other non-cancer diseases," Tsalka said in a speech to the opening session of the Chernobyl Forum.

However Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN's watchdog atomic agency, said in a speech read out to the opening session, as he was not present, that "poverty, mental health problems and 'lifestyle' diseases have come to pose a far greater threat to affected communities than radiation exposure."

He said that people bombarded with dire predictions of apocalyptic death tolls "came to regard themselves not as 'survivors' but as helpless, weak and lacking control over their futures."

The forum brings together nuclear, health and development experts from eight UN agencies, meeting under the aegis of ElBaradei's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The explosion on April 26, 1986, of the number four reactor at Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union (in what is now Ukraine), sent a radioactive cloud across Europe in what was the worst nuclear accident in history.

The report the forum is reviewing says that out of more than 600,000 people who suffered the most exposure from the accident -- reactor staff, emergency and recovery personnel in 1986-87 and residents of the nearby areas -- an estimated 3,940 are expected to die from radiation-induced cancer and leukemia.

Burton Bennett, an expert on radiation effects who is chairing the meeting, said this figure was not at all exact and should be taken as a sign of the extent to which authorities have "overplayed the health consequences" of the accident.

He said misinformation was responsible for a range of psychological problems as people in the region of Chernobyl thought they were doomed to get cancer, when in fact their exposure to radiation had been relatively low.

Mizsei said an "industry has been built on this unfortunate event," with 22 percent of the national budget of Belarus in 1991 being dedicated to Chernobyl relief, a figure that has since dropped to six percent.

In Ukraine, the portion of the national budget devoted to benefits for Chernobyl survivors and other measures has risen from five to seven percent during the same period, a UNDP expert said.

A representative from Russia, the other main country affected, said "that the most grave results of the Chernobyl accident were in the social area rather than in the radiological area."

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