"It is hard for me to walk for too long. I can't even do housework," said the 14-year-old girl, who suffers from a congenital double hip deformity that condemns her to a life indoors. "I can't go to school anymore."

Aiguerim's family lives 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, where the Soviet military tested about 500 atomic bombs between 1949 and 1991.

Together with other Soviet former republics, Kazakhstan turned its nuclear arsenal over to Russia when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, but the decades of testing left a grim legacy: chronic disease in villages like Aiguerim's, where the 2,000 inhabitants can rarely afford treatment even when it is available.

"The dispensary only provides drugs for emergencies... and the hospital was closed in 1991," said paediatrician Laura Medetkyzy, who works in Aiguerim's village, Sarzhal.

The most serious diseases are blamed on the 160 bombs exploded above ground before 1962.

"People have deformities, cancers, anaemias, cataracts, renal diseases, pulmonary or cardiac" problems, Medetkyzy said. "It is rare that anyone here lives beyond 60."

Radioactive fallout is only part of the grim legacy of Soviet planning mistakes in Central Asia. Another is the rapidly vanishing Aral Sea, which lies between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and was devastated by decades of pollution and poorly conceived irrigation projects.

And the fallout of nuclear testing is not limited to a few small villages. Dangerous radiation levels here affect some 1.2 million people, nearly 10 percent of Kazakhstan's population, according to the official figure.

"For this population, cases of cancers are 300 to 400 percent above" average, said Boris Galich, the top state expert and the deputy manager at the Institute of Radiation of Semipalatinsk, a government-run treatment and research facility.

"It's terrible. The average age for (developing) cancer has fallen from 60 to 40," he said. The victims are entitled to disability pensions, but they require a long bureaucratic procedure with regular appearances before various committees -- and mistakes are common. Irina, 58, who suffers from throat cancer, in January lost her official status as a victim of the tests she witnessed as a child, astonished by the spectacle of mushroom clouds rising in the sky.

In December 2006, her doctor told her she needed a third operation, which filled her with fear.

When she refused, "they told me I was not sick anymore and withdrew my disability," she gasped, her voice broken by an earlier operation that damaged her vocal chords.

Irina appealed to the NGO Ekho Polygon, which supports with test victims, for help.

"There are fewer problems now than after Kazakhstan's independence (in 1991), when the state had no money," said Nadezhda Isanova, organisation's director. "But there are always shortages."

The local population's nightmare is far from over, as each day children fall sick or are born with deformities.

For this new generation of victims, activists said, compensation is being kept to a bare minimum.

This is partly blamed on meagre government funds and -- critics say -- insufficient official attention to the victims' suffering.

But according to Galich, correctly identifying those made sick from radiation and those from other, unrelated causes is not simple.

"There are many contradictions on what the consequences are for future generations," he said. "It is not clear what is being passed on to the next generation."

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