For the first time in 70 years, government officials have disclosed information about the environmental situation in Russia and state of health of its population. At a press conference Wednesday, officials said that President Boris Yeltsin wants to start presenting an annual report about these issues, which have previously been kept secret in the former Soviet Union.


Russia's environmental protection and natural resources minister, Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, painted a grim picture of the environment, saying that there had been no decline in pollution over the past years.


"The situation is very serious", Danilov-Danilyan said. "In every industrial center in Russia, a multifold concentration of toxic substances in the atmosphere has been registered".


Nearly all of Russia's waterways are heavily polluted, and half of all tap water is unfit to drink, the minister said. The timber industry, which is responsible for layers of decomposing wood resting on the bottom of rivers, for example, is one of the many polluters.


At the conference, Valentin Pokrovsky, the vice minister of health care stressed that data published in the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta was correct but not necessarily accurate, since the report is the first to ever be disclosed and could therefore not be checked.


The article said that only one in four children can be considered healthy when they leave school. If army recruitment committees would be applied to international health standards, only 20 percent of young Russian men would be considered fit to serve, the report added.


More than 2. 5 million people in Russia alone live in areas contaminated by the 1986 Chemobyl nuclear disaster, and millions more were affected in the Ukraine and Belarus. The annual population growth shrank from one million people in 1980 to 200, 000 in 1991.


Birth rates have dropped drastically, Pokrovsky said. In some regions the amount of deaths has exceeded births. There are now 29 of such regions, in comparison to 9 previously. Average life expectancy rates have dropped from 64 for men and 74 for women in 1991 to 63 for men and 69 for women in 1992.


The free medical service is also in an abysmal state. Some 40 percent of hospitals do not have hot water, while an additional 12 percent have no water at all. Sanitary norms are violated in 70 percent of all hospitals.


Some 98 percent of the population has dental problems and 3. 5 percent are said to be alcoholic.


Consumption of healthy food has declined with the average diet being short of protein and vitamins. Alexei Yablokov, Yeltsin's adviser on ecological and health protection issues, said at the conference that 10 percent of all food was contaminated in one way or another. According to forecasts, only between 15 to 20 percent of all children will be born healthy by 2015.