IAEA and WHO are notorious for counting only directly attributable deaths. If someone dies from radiation-induced cancer 10 years after in the ripe age of 30-something, it doesn't get in the stats. Then the stats get perpetuated endlessly by nuclear fanboys.
Yeah, that is the most frustrating thing about the arguments from Chernobyl revisionists.
There was no possibility to do all the science that would ideally have been done, everywhere it should have been done. So the anecdotal evidence is often the only evidence--and it is discounted. That is where you get idiotic statements like 'only 28 people died as a result of Chernobyl'. Also, there are many other things that happened to people short of death that nevertheless really sucked, e.g. getting nonfatal thyroid cancer.
There's definitely merit to having a compendium of only rigorous scientific results, of course, but it doesn't help advance the debate (or the species) when such work is mischaracterized and used to promulgate bogus conclusions (much less weird fanboy ideologies).
