Deadly Dust: Study Suggests Cancer Risk from Depleted Uranium
Depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the metal’s effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU causes health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased.
DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes, and its high density - twice that of lead - makes it useful for armor and armor piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defense was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and birth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons.
Now researchers at the University of Southern Maine have shown that DU damages DNA in human lung cells. The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.
The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily. “These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer,” the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.
Previous studies have shown that uranium miners are at higher risk of lung cancer, but this has often been put down to the fact that miners are also exposed to radon, another cancer-causing chemical.
Prof Wise said it is too early to say whether DU causes lung cancer in people exposed on the battlefield because the disease takes several decades to develop.
“Our data suggest that it should be monitored as the potential risk is there,” he said.
Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explosion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers and people returning after the conflict.
Once they are lodged in the lung even low levels of radioactivity would damage DNA in cells close by. “The real question is whether the level of exposure is sufficient to cause health effects. The answer to that question is still unclear,” he said, adding that there has as yet been little research on the effects of DU on civilians in combat zones. “Funding for DU studies is very sparse and so defining the disadvantages is hard,” he added.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Forget about D.U.
These people are the real terrorists!!!!
CIGARETTES
In the United States, tobacco consumption causes over 400000 deaths per year and contributes to more than one of every six deaths.[14,15] In 1988 alone, teenagers spent $1.26 billion on cigarettes and smokeless tobacco.[14] Approximately 2 million teenagers begin smoking cigarettes each year.[14] Despite the ban on television advertising of cigarettes, the prominent display of logos, billboards, and banners in televised sports events makes cigarette advertising on American television more prominent than ever before.[16]
In two recent studies, one-third of 3-year-old children and nearly all children older than age 6 were able to recognize the Old Joe Camel logo.[17,18] By age 6 the Camel logo is as familiar to children as Mickey Mouse.[17]
Advertising for Camel cigarettes was more effective among children and adolescents than among adults.[18] Camel’s share of the illegal children’s cigarette market represents sales of $476 million per year–one-third of all cigarette sales to minors.[18]
I remember reading an article in Lancet back in 1997 showing an increase in bone cancer among Iraqi children post “desert storm” and clearly linking it to DU. That widely dissemnated information did not stop Clinton from using it in Jugoslavia (despite European protests) or Bush from using it in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a crime that will continue for many generations. Even without the spectre of mushroom clouds, this is a nuclear war.
Yeah but look how corporate profits are skyrocketing. Who’s really going to care about people when the real power brokers are making out like bandits.
This war is almost over. Look for some new “terror threat” to make the next one inevitable.
DU is a heavy metal like Lead and Mercury and so anybody who has had a high school chemistry class should not be surprised that DU is a health hazard.
The military should be forced to explain how this particular heavy metal is an exception to laws of chemistry and physics and biology and physiology. It is a miracle.
Some engineer made the point of keeping a DU paperweight on his desk to show how harmless it is. However, the paperweight was painted as he knew better than to expose himself to any minute particles of that dangerous stuff.
Several years ago we already had a TV documentary showing pictures of birth defects of certain types that were , alas, common in Japan after the A bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And these cancers and defects very rarely occur in other circumstances!
And, before going to Iraq I believe a lot of soldiers left sperm in sperm banks fearing exposure to various toxic substances and who knows what else in Iraq could lead to birth defects in children they might have after the war.
It’s a good thing the above article is drawing attention to the dangers of DU but it really doesn’t go far enough, in fact, I find it so “timid” it resembles spin. Remember when we had no PROOF of global warming, no PROOF of the dangers of smoking, no PROOF of any dangers in genetically modified grains? I recall when manufacturers had to be sure their products were SAFE before selling them but I guess that has gone out of style.
Am so glad to see this effort to put out in to the open the horrible effects of DU. There is good reason to suspect DU in the tremendous rise in birth defects in Iraq and a relationship between DU and birth defects among children of returned servicemen.
One of the first articles published on the subject, can still be found on the web at:
http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html
It was published by The Chugoku Shimbun, Hiroshima, Japan. If any people are sensitive to radiation poisoning, they certainly have reason to be. There were only a handful of references to DU when the current war in Iraq started, most of these had to do with the increase in birth defects
with new Iraqi mothers wanting to know more if their baby was normal than what sex it was. Now there are over a million references.
I’ve seen first hand the devastation in Vietnam from the poison of Agent Orange, and I’ve sat with a young woman whose husband came home sick from Iraq - his illness and suffering denied by the military. We have a long way to go to get rid of the callousness of mankind, but the continuance of a human race depends on it.
I encourage any who read this to acquaint themselves with both the research on DU and the lack of testing by the US military. Information is easily obtainable simply by “googling” depleted uranium. Although legitimate outrage may begin small, it grows exponentially.
DUH!! WHAT NEXT? SKYDIVING WITHOUT A PARACHUTE IS REALLY NOT BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH, JUST THE RAPID DECELLERATION THAT FOLLOWS?
This is the way the USA gets rid of their excess nuclear waste..just blast it all over the countries of people you dont like…unfortunately, it kills women, children and US soldiers indecriminately as well.
I have been railing against DU for the past 5 years. and more. It is responsible for the birth defects in American children of soldiers from Gulf War I, the birth defects in Iraqi childdren after that same war. We now shall have massive defects in both Iraqi, Bosnian,Afghani, Albanian and Serbian children, not to mention the American children of GIs who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The entire Bush/Cheney crime family need to be tried as War Criminals for crimes against humanity.
It takes 4.5 billion years for DU to reach half it’s level of radiation!
No, no, no!!! Don’t you know. It was only deadly when Clinton used it. Bush’s compassionate version is kinder and gentler.
pi_dpiper is right on one level in that health officials restricted tobacco on the inference that smoking caused cancer amongsts other things. The same restrivctions did not proscribe the use of DU, although as another writer acknowledges morbidity in nations where DU has been used show a higher rate of cancers, particularly in children. Takashi Morizumi a japanese photographer who lives in Nagasaki and not surprisingly is particularly interested in the effects of radioactivity on cilvilian populations. His haunting photo collection, the Childen of the Gulf War records the legacy left by the DU used in the first Iraqi invasion by the US.I took that exhibition to Australia in 2000 and it made a huge impact on public opinion. Radioactivity tends to effect rapidly growing cells and fat cells as are found in children so leukaemias and breast cancers are on the rise. The global increase in breast cancer could be a side effect of increased background radiation levels.
But Piper is wrong to equate tobacco and DU and say tobacco is worse.. or to play the double jeopardy game. While smokers choose to keep smoking despite adverse publicity, people do not choose to have war rained upon their heads, much less to be left with a radioactive legacy of 45 billion years which is the half life of U 238. UNEP has found DU in tea plants and livestock in Kosovo. It was first used against the Egyptians by the Israelis in 1973, so we have had lots of time to research it. Incidentally the Israelis used it against the Lebanese but it may come home to haunt them as desert winds and traffic lift and carry the extremely fine oxides which do not recognise borders. DU has been found in clouds above Greece and dust from iraq traced as far as England. DU was used extensively in the US in proving ground trials and livermore continues to use it and test it.
It is a weapon of indiscriminate and ongoing destruction.
Now if Piper wanted to compare tobacco to illegal drugs and the ever ridiculous war on drugs he/she would have me on side.
This article starts with a couple of misleading statements:
“DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power.”
“It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes”
Whether this is due to spin or ignorance, I have no idea.
First of all, DU is NOT an isotope — U238 is an isotope. “Virgin” uranium is a cocktail of U istotopes, mainly U238 and U235. This is refined not only for nuclear power, but also for weapons. The by-product is NOT a pure istope (U238)as implied in the article — it still contains other, more unstable (=radioactive)isotopes.
Furthermore, virgin ore contains other radioactive elements than uranium — and this applies even more to the material refined from breeder reactors (mainly for weapons production). The reason for this is simple: ALL radioactive material decays in a cascade to other elements, many of which are much much more unstable (=radioactive) than the original element (and that DOES include U238)
As alpha emitters, none of the U isotopes are dangerous — OUTSIDE the body! An alpha particle is basically a helium nucleus with a high velocity, that is kinetic energy. As it has a positive electric charge, it can’t go far through the air and cannot even penetrate the outer layers of the skin. Inside the body, the only thing to stop it are living cells.
Finally, although the lungs are obviously a bad place to have an alpha emitter lodged — the material, as dust or larger particles can also be ingested along with food or liquids. In that case it will mostly end up in kidneys.
The doctors I met in Iraq in 2001 knew very well the relationship between Du and cancer…particularly in children…they play with the unexploded bombs and fragments.
But all weaponry is poisonous. Thats the idea. Indroduce a foreign substance into the body or the environment. What’s new? So what’s next? Poisoned arrows?
Typhoid blankets?
Fast food? (That’s working well on the children in the US)!
How can we control the corporations that manufacture these shells and the politicians that are controlled by these corporations? Is your mutual fund invested in them? Until we get responsible government, one thing we can do is to divest ourselves and our organizations of these stocks and invest in socially responsible funds.
Their super-rich owners may not care about the harm their corporations cause, but they and their offspring will be breathing the same radioactive air, drinking the same radioactive water and eating the same radioactive food for countless generations into the future.
Radioactive waste forbodes a bleak future. Higher forms of life are more succeptible to damage from radiation, but an ant in a microwave survives with no problem. D.U. shells are a fraction of the increasing total of nuclear radiation from power plants, nuke wastes and impending nuke war. Other kinds of radiation are also on the increase.
“Controlling corporations”.
I don’t think that is possible.
The sad thing about this country is that we’ll go on debating whether DU is dangerous for years and years. Here is but one link to more information about the effects of DU:
http://www.gulfwarvets.com/du.htm
Is DU dangerous? DUH!
It’s important to look at the actual composition of the “DU” that goes into various munitions - because it can be highly variable, and apparently it’s not strictly sourced from the intial uranium isotope fractionation process.
However, all nuclear fuel production is hidden under layers of government security, it’s hard to tell what goes into a DU munition. Is it simply the byproduct of the isotope enrichement process, which results in U238 that is depleted in the fissionable isotope, U235? Or are byproducts from plutonium processing also included in the weapons? The latter seems to be true.
There are reports from the Israeli-Lebanon war that signatures “spent” nuclear waste was found at a site in Lebanon, indicating that hot nuclear fission products had also been incorporated into DU munitions. Robert Fisk reported on this use in Lebanon:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1935945.ece
“Dr Busby’s initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. “The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash … The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium.” A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.”
“Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. A waste productof the enrichment process is depleted uranium, it is an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles for penetrating armour. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.”
See also the report at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0121-02.htm
“Depleted Uranium Shells Held ‘Cocktail of Nuclear Waste’
by Jonathon Carr-Brown
SHELLS fired in the Gulf war and Kosovo were made out of material contaminated by a potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear waste, according to a book published this week.
The claim, supported by American army and government documents, suggests that the military in Kosovo and Iraq used depleted uranium (DU) shells containing traces of elements that indicate the probable presence of plutonium and other highly toxic nuclear by-products.”
Obviously, the only sane thing to do is to ban these weapons - they are far more dangerous than land mines.
The phrase “Depleted Uranium” is an astonishingly successful Orwellian misdirection. By accepting “Depleted Uranium” as subject of debate, the media succumbs to a lie before it is even discussed. “Depleted Uranium” is depleted of only truthfulness: uranium “depletes”, i.e decays into lead and only lead or decays into a another form of Uranium. Uranium 235 decays to become Uranium 238, and this is what is refered to as “Depleted Uranium”. The daughter isotope is still radioactive (althogh emits a different particle than the parent) and it certainly isn’t lead. I have seen this acknowledged only a few times, and the reply most often heard runs along “Yeah, OK, but it’s alpha radioctive, not gamma, and notebook paper blocks alpha particles.” The stress of impact, however, turns a part of every round fired into U238 smoke, and the tissue of your lungs or any other organ (including skin) is not coated with notebook paper.
By accepting that its danger needs to be proven you (we) loose. The burden of proof rests upon any claim that it’s safe since such a claim is tantamount to asserting that although our bodies are damaged by all other forms of radiation, we have some magical protection from U238.
In fact, a far more accurate term for “Depleted Uranium” is “Radioactive Lead.”
I predict that the use of DU in will be considered by future historians as one of the great barbarisms of the twilight years of the Amerikkan empire.
“Wil Van Natta May 9th, 2007 11:24 am
“Controlling corporations”.
I don’t think that is possible.”
The Swiss control corporations direct democratically. That get them the highest per capita income in the world. More on this at Mike Gravel’s site.
The people who manufacture such weapons as well as those who authorize the unleashing of such weapons ought to be rounded up and forced to be the first to go in and clean up the mess they have made. Put ‘em in dayglow orange jump suits and make ‘em live in the hell they have created.
That’s what we did to the Germans who tolerated places like Buchenwald and Dachau at the end of WWII.
Excuse me, but something’s terribly wrong here. If we’re gonna make ammunition aimed at killing people what in the hell does it matter what we put in them? The point is it’s time to become civilized enough to sit down and settle things like adults, through communication and compromise, not with any kind of munitions. The the “Christian Right” has totally lost track of is that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is pretty damed explicit - and there are no caveats built in to that very clear code for behavior stated in almost all religions.
The USA’s use of DU is responsible for major/hidous birth defects and loads of needless human suffering.
—————–
Lots of color pictures here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BUL20060122&articleId=1777
Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml
=======
Those who know a significant amount of truth about the unprovoked misery caused by our bastard misleaders and their merciless military/economic terrorism, fully understand why many people in other nations call the USA the great satan. In Europe the phrase “ugly american” is well known. Both names are well deserved. Our nation is full of conceited, arrogant, self-centered fools.
The USA is the #1 obstacle to world peace and the chief cause of global human suffering. Our nation is the undisputed champion of horror - both in terms of actual events inflicted upon other people and via sickening fiction shows & movies.
Three cheers for CommonDreams and the progressive community. In the near future, we’ll overcome all the horror!
I agree completely that Depleted Uranium sould be banned
for use in weapons of war. If the people who make it need
to be protected from it during the manufacturing process
then it obviously dangerous.
I’d like to address peacnik’s
arguments.
“The point is it’s time to become civilized enough to sit down and
settle things like adults, through communication and compromise, not
with any kind of munitions.”
This was done with Adolf Hitler before WWII was going full swing, but
amazingly, the lying murderer didn’t keep his word. Who could have
seen that coming?
Saddam Hussein idolized Hitler, used poison gas on his own people and
had torture chambers all over Iraq, but does that mean we couldn’t
trust him to keep his word?
Peacnik goes on to write this: “The “Christian Right” has totally lost
track of is that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is pretty damed explicit”.
In the New Testament, Jesus quoted that commandment as “Thou shalt not
murder”. The word translated as “Kill” in the Old Testament could have
been translated as “murder”. It was just a bad choice by the
translators as God himself sent the Israelis to war time and time
again after giving that commandment.
Ecclesiastes 3:3 says there is “a time to kill and a time to heal.”
Ecclesiastes 3:8 says there is ” a time to love and a time to hate, a
time for war and a time for peace.”
It would be a good idea to read the Bible before chiding people for
their interpretation of it.
ronnism -
really good to think about all you folks out there who approve of war and killing - and whatever you call it, it’s still killing. And it’s wrong.
peacnik
So we shouldn’t have fought in WWII. We should have let Hitler take over the world and systematically exterminate everyone who wasn’t blonde, blue eyed and German because killing is wrong.
Conservative estimates set the death toll of WWII at over 48 million people. Had we entered the war early, and not listened to the peace niks, we could have saved 30, maybe 40 million people. Murderers, especially mass murderers need to be killed in order to save lives.
Saddam Hussein had a 30 year reign of terror in Iraq. He gased thousands of his own people and tortured 10s of thousands more. How is that peace? Where were your protests then?
Published on Saturday, August 12, 2006 by the Associated Press
Is an Armament Sickening U.S. Soldiers?
by Deborah Hastings
Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, Herbert Reeds’ gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.
There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.
In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.
“I’m just a zombie walking around,” he says.
Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.
A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.
Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he’d never experienced in his previously healthy life.
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.
“We all had migraines. We all felt sick,” Reed says. “The doctors said, ‘It’s all in your head.’ ”
Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.
But the medic knew something the others didn’t.
Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They’d brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.
“We got on the Internet,” Reed said, “and we started researching depleted uranium.”
Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.
Then they hired a lawyer.
___
Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey’s Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.
The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.
The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.
The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.
Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA. Those results were negative, Reed said. “Their test just isn’t as sophisticated,” he said. “And when we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn’t one. They’ve lied to us all along.”
The VA’s testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.
The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.
“The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all,” said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. “Then you have far-left groups that … declare it a crime against humanity.”
Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.
An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.
Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.
Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous — not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation.
A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before leaving the military as a conscientious objector.
“I’ve been working on this since ‘93 and I’ve just given up hope,” he said. “I’ve spoken to successive federal committees and elected officials … who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes.”
At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide. Two of the most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile, not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.
“The bottom line is it’s more hazardous than the Pentagon admits,” Fahey said, “but it’s not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it is. And there’s a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans.”
There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.
Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.
Iraqi authorities “found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities,” the U.N. reported.
Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.
In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops.
___
Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.
Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.
The study group’s size is controversial — far too small, say experts including Fahey — and so are the findings of the voluntary, Baltimore-based study.
It has found “no clinically significant” health effects from depleted uranium exposure in the study subjects, according to its researchers.
Critics say the VA has downplayed participants’ health problems, including not reporting one soldier who developed cancer, and another who developed a bone tumor.
So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged despite the government’s spending of at least $300 million.
About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed’s unit.
Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.
But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.
But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they’d been exposed? Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell. And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested?
It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.
It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange — a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy — was linked to those sufferings.
It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.
In 2002, Congress voted to not let that happen again.
It established the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses — comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates. It reports to the secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients against a single standard: Have sick soldiers been made better?
The answer, according to the committee, is no.
“Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal,” stated its December 2005 report. “Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective.”
And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the deserts of Iraq.
___
Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall. He strides into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a soldier. Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.
His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased. But there is something wrong, a niggling imperfection made more noticeable by a bearing so disciplined. It is a limp — more like a hitch in his get-along.
It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.
Even sleep offers no release. He dreams of gunfire and bombs and soldiers who scream for help. No matter how hard he tries, he never gets there in time.
At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the Riker’s Island prison.
He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.
According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed. He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity. He says he didn’t get anything of the kind. Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up for the current war, according to veterans’ groups.
Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians’ offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.
But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.
Some days he feels fine. “Some days I can’t get out of bed,” he said from his home in Colorado.
Now 29, he’s had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small stroke — one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.
“Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it,” he said. “Except I couldn’t move the right side of my body.”
After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.
He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from a series of “non-related conditions.” He knows he was exposed to DU.
“A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles.”
No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed’s, is self-taught from the Internet.
Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn’t feel up to the fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.
He’d really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel the same.
“I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape. Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they’re in as good as shape as a professional athlete.
“Then we come back and we’re all sick.”
They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.
© Copyright 2006 Associated Press
This filth contaminates every theatre of war that the U.S. and Israel have operated in since the first Gulf war. Test proceedures have been sophisticated enough untill recently or scientifically and competently conducted to avoid being discounted by US Administration critics.
Work by Dr Rosalie Bertell, has come closest to explaining the action of Depleted Uranium in weapons use and its effects on humans. Enough is known to declare this material a weapon of Mass Destruction and it’s use, a crime against humanity.
America has no interest in exploring the horrific facts.
Take time to follow the science here.