Yesterday, Gina and I bought a dining table from IKEA. A good looking solid beech table. We liked the simplicity and the price. A few hours later, we were looking at the table at home.

That's when I said: "You know what, this table was produced in Ukraine."

Gina looked at me... and I immediately had the same thought she obviously had - radioactive?

Are we going to eat everyday on a table that may be radioactive?

After some consideration, we came to the conclusion that not even IKEA's CEO can guarantee the exact origin of wood coming out of Ukraine - in terms of possible contamination. A quick search on the web brought an article about the situation in Belarus (which, BTW, got more contaminated than Ukraine by Chernobyl). Here is a snippet from the article:

"Ten minutes from Cherikov, a thousand-square-mile 'alienation zone' is posted with large white billboards warning the trespasser in Russian that she’ll be fined ten months' salary if caught inside. The zone isn't fenced. For miles it looks like a normal coniferous forest opening onto green pastures that flow into ancient orchards. But there are freshly cut tree stumps, wet and golden in the weak sunlight. On the edge of the timber a crane loads tree trunks onto a flatbed lumber truck.

'Milling wood doesn’t prevent it from emitting radioactivity, does it?' I ask our van driver and translator, Mikhail Koslovski, a representative of With Hope for the Future, one of the many projects that have stepped into the post-Soviet funding vacuum to aid victims of Chernobyl.

'No,' he answers, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.

'Then what are they doing?'

'Belarus is poor, Hope,' he says. 'It goes to Minsk to be made into furniture.'

I want to make sure I've understood him. 'People in Minsk make furniture out of radioactive trees and then sell it to unsuspecting buyers?'

'Da,' he says quietly."

So, we are returning the table to IKEA - end of story.

And then you start thinking... IKEA is selling a lot of furniture for children's rooms, etc., etc... And then, is it IKEA only doing this...?