German pigs still radioactive after Chernobyl

Mushroom-rooting wild pigs in southern Germany still have abnormally high levels of radioactivity, 19 years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, scientists said today.

The radioactivity in the wild pigs, which live in the forests of the southern German state of Bavaria, can be attributed to their diet of a kind of wild truffle that grows underground and absorbs high amounts of radioactivity, said Florian Emrich, a spokesman for Germany’s federal office for protection against radioactivity.