Chernobyl Motorbike ride a hoax?

Was stumbling around the web this evening and saw that the photos of that woman going around the radioactive wasteland around chernobyl on a motorbike were a hoax. I found those photos quite moving when I first went through them. After a bit of reflection, I'm not sure this lessens their impact. Certainly, it's a little sad to think that someone has gone to the trouble of faking them, but to be honest, the emotions were stirred by the aftermath of the explosion and the fact that it's a modern tragedy that has more or less been forgotten by everyone. You can apparently tour the wasteland though....



Chernobyl - I was about 12 when that happened... 18 years ago. Some stats.

• 100,000 people evacuated from the blast zone in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia
• 25 000 of the 800 000 liquidators have so far died as a result of their exposure to radiation
• Estimated total number of deaths so far - 100,000
• c. 1800 children and adolescents in the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus have contracted cancer of the thyroid because of the reactor disaster
• this number expected to rise to 8,000 in the next 10 years
• The number of breast cancer cases in Gomel (Belarus) has doubled

Let's not let the veracity of the photos get in the way of this ongoing tragedy.