Callous Facebook advertisement for a Chernobyl air humidifer

I've seen and heard a lot in my 54½ years, so it's hard to shock me. But I did a disgusted double-take when advertisements for a Chernobyl nuclear power plant air humidifier began showing up in my Facebook feed. 

"Where history meets health," states one advertisement.

"From disaster to delight," states another.

In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in what is now Ukraine, exploded and caught fire during a routine test that went catastrophically wrong due to a critical reactor design flaw. Deaths eventually totaled in the thousands as radioactive contaminants spread across Europe and the Soviet Union.

How many thousands? That's a difficult question to answer, given the uniqueness of the disaster, the complication of tracking radiation across a vast area, and the reality of long-term health effects that take years to emerge. The conservative scientific estimate is that between 4,000 and 16,000 deaths can be directly attributed to Chernobyl. Other assessments that cannot be lightly dismissed put the death total as high as 90,000.

And those are just the human deaths. No one, to my knowledge, has attempted even a ballpark guess on the number of animal deaths.

But, hey, from disaster to delight, right?

Also, more than 300,000 residents across three countries were permanently displaced due to deadly radiation levels.

Here are passages about Chernobyl, then and now, from the 2021 book "Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape," by Cal Flyn:

• "In the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accident, there was a huge spike in ionizing radiation. But many of the radioactive elements released were highly unstable. They self-destruct, sometimes in seconds. Others over weeks. The most feared product of nuclear fission, in terms of its health impact, is iodine-131, which is easily absorbed by the body. Iodine-131 is stored in the thyroid, where is emits harmful beta radiation, damaging flesh in the immediate area or causing either the gland's destruction or, in lower doses, cancer. (At least four thousand cases of thyroid cancers among the children of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia have been attributed to the radionuclide's effect.)"
• "Seventy percent of the [Chernobyl exclusion] zone is now forest. Pripyat is the territory of the birch and the maple and the poplar, and their leaves lie in a thick litter on the tarmac, branches bare and colorless  but for the globes of green mistletoe and the mustard lichen that mists their bark. Matted shrubs crowd their lower reaches, flecked with the red points of rosehips gone soft. Ivy weaves between their legs. Apartment blocks rise like concrete islands from a sea of green. The trees are standing too close, crowding doors and blocking windows, growing in tight against the walls."
• "It is the most radioactive environment on Earth. These radioactive hinterlands are the consequences of human folly, hubris, of deaths made with the devil."

So, yeah, let's not support crap like this humidifier. We can be better.