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Children Pay Ultimate Price of Iraq's Poisonous Wartime Legacy
The effects of depleted uranium can be seen among the young in the city’s hospitals, where staff are convinced of its link to cancer and deformities
THE AIRY, bright and modern corridors of the new, $166 million (€116 million) 101-bed Laura Bush hospital for children with cancer are a short car journey from the colourfully painted, but ageing Ibn Ghazwan maternity and children’s hospital in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
They provide a rare contrast to the greyish-brown city streetscape, whose dusty, fume-filled air will reach 60 degrees this summer and is some of the most polluted in the world.
Brightness and colour might inspire initial hope in the minds of concerned parents here, but both hospitals still lack vital machines and laboratory equipment needed to provide radiotherapy or to diagnose the numerous conditions that mean up to 10 babies die every day in the Ibn Ghazwan maternity ward.
“We are blind,” says Dr Ahmed Jafer, a paediatric specialist. “Ours is the only neo-natal unit in this region but we cannot quickly diagnose what exactly we are dealing with. Our children are dying from malnutrition, diarrhoea, TB, meningitis, leishmaniasis, chronic liver disease, pneumonia, anaemia and congenital heart disease, all of which are easily preventable outside of Iraq.”
Add to this the high incidence of miscarriages, up to 40 abortions every week, child leukaemia rates that more than doubled here from 1993 to 2007 and the weekly number of tumours and congenital deformities – missing eyes or limbs for example – that children are born with and you only begin to get a sense of the scale of the horror that has been visited on Basra’s children; indeed, on many more across Iraq – since UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein began during the first Gulf War in 1991.
Dr Jafer and his colleagues may be metaphorically blind. But two-year-old Abu Felah Reyal’s blindness – in his right eye, over which an enlarged tumour has developed – is real. He has been undergoing chemotherapy at the Laura Bush hospital, many of whose patients are from Missan City, Zubair and Nasariyeh, which are south of Basra, near the border with Kuwait.
Four-month-old Mustafa Farej, whose liver tumour has left him with an enlarged abdomen, has also had aggressive chemotherapy. He now has a chest infection and the expression on his face looks pained even as he sleeps on a bed in a quiet corner of the ward.
Large stickers featuring the happy smiling faces of Disney characters – Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and friends – adorn the walls, witnesses in a slightly surreal way to the fate of the patients here.
Senior and front-line medical staff say chemical weapons, including those featuring depleted uranium (DU), were used extensively in the border region during the Iran-Iraq and subsequent Gulf wars.
Their poisonous legacy will continue to take the lives of children for years to come.
“You can find evidence of the effects of DU in patients’ urine or you can do biopsies and establish a link. But we don’t have the facilities to do this; we have little doubt that DU is linked to the rise in cancer and deformities. We’re also seeing a rise in infertility in men and women, which is a concern,” says Prof Thamer Hamdan, dean of Basra Medical College.
It costs over $200,000 to treat a child for leukaemia. At the Laura Bush hospital, 80 per cent of the cost of the expensive medicines is met by the Aladdin’s Magic Lamp Project – a small Vienna-based charity – and its European partners. At the moment, the Iraqi government, through Basra’s local health authority, covers the remainder.
Save The Children and their funding partners are also providing assistance here, through teacher training, education, psychosocial, capacity-building and school water and sanitation schemes.
But senior medical staff in Basra also point to a shortage of people with leadership and management skills that can be passed on and which can assist the improvement of the health, water and sanitation infrastructure.
Visiting one of Save The Children’s colourful “child-friendly spaces”, about 40 boys and girls from the locality – who are usually segregated in school – are playing and laughing together in a classroom about an hour’s drive towards the marshlands outside Basra.
Thought to be the location of the Garden of Eden, the marshlands are a splash of green on Iraq’s dull landscape. And in Chibaysh, among the reeds which grow in abundance, tadpoles, sticklebacks, bird life and buffalo appear to be thriving thanks to government and community regeneration efforts.
As we pass a tall, newly built concrete pier beside a community reservoir, some children are jumping off it into the waters of one of the many irrigation channels of clear, pale-greenish water that criss-cross this vast area. Splashes and laughter might be the everyday sounds of a normal childhood. But while a poisonous legacy of past wars also exists here, they are sounds that many of Iraq’s children may never know.
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26 Comments so far
Show AllLooking for Laura Bush quotes to see if she's ever said,"They hate us for our freedoms."
I did find this,"George is not an overly introspective person. He has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesn't need to evaluate and reevaluate a decision. He doesn't try to overthink. He likes action."
Laura Bush
I think I came close. Oh and where did she come up with $161 Million to pay for her namesake? At least they'll know what family to thank for their cancer "care" experiences.
How about Golda Meir? "...we will never forgive the Arabs for what they made us do to their children." Ain't Zionism beautiful.
The only solution is the dissolution of Israel and reparations to those harmed by Zionism, including these children.
The US totally knew that this would happen! It was publicized enough that Democracy Now did several stories on it back as the war started. I warned a friends son, who was training to go to Afghanistan, to stay away from anything to do with shelling and armaments because it is also our Soldiers who have been exposed.
I can not think of something evil enough to happen to those who coldly made this decision to get rid of their stores of depleted uranium by incorporating it into weapons that would permanently affect those whom we invaded, as well as our young soldiers and their families to come.
"poopka47401"
They are not "our soldiers."
Anyone who joins the military is allowing themselves to become a cog inside the Corporate Capital (fascist) Machine. The corrupt economic system which the U.S. has adopted as its state religion guarantees fewer and fewer options for its victims wherever they may live.
Military arm of the corporations.
Another 'nuclear' war?
The Laura Bush Hospital?????? Holy Crap. Haven't we done enough harm to Iraq and her people. Seriously, this falls under the category of too crazy to make up. If that Texas trash had an ounce of class, she would have declined the "honor" of having the hospital named after her, given what her husband did to Iraq and it's people. I'm reasonably certain LadyBird Johnson never had a hospital in Vietnam named after her.
And lest our fellow patriotic Americans get all smug, the DU isn't all staying in Iraq. Some of it will be hitching a ride back with our brave warriors, so there will be x percentage of cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects in 'murka as well.
Any doubt yet that we are the terrorists? The Empire needs to go down, and it will.
It's a shame that the passing reference to a "Laura Bush Hospital" is the item that stands out in another tale from "One Thousand and One Nights in Amerikan-Built Hell", but there it is.
I suppose it could be thought of as a euphemism for the "Ugly Amerikan Hospital", which would surely terrify the already traumatized patients.
Too bad Laura's Gorgon of a mother-in-law, Barbara, didn't support the project instead of Laura.
"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths," Barbara Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America" on March 18, 2003. "Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
They could've called it the "Beautiful Mind" Hospital.
Sorry, sometimes black humor is all I can summon in response to the absolute horror and evil wrought by the monstrous government in my native land.
The US deserves all it gets for letter the Untreated Drunk lie us into the Iraq War.
Lowered immunity, mutations, rampant childhood disease and early death: The legacy of the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq.
While I share the sentiments of the author and the commenters about the War our government wages on Iraq and its consequences, it is not substantiated that the medical injuries described here can be attributed to depleted uranium. For a succinct up-to-date summary go to http://hps.org/documents/dufactsheet.pdf
Uranium is a heavy metal that is chemically toxic to the kidneys if sufficiently large quantities enter the blood stream. But its harm is not due to the fact that it is radioactive. A half-life of 4.5 billion years means that the radioactive aspect is minimal compared to that of its chemistry.
You're half right. It is toxic chemically. But within the body, in close proximity to cells, the radioactivity is a factor in chromosomal damage. It just doesn't do it's damage immediately. Given time, measured in years, it will hit it's target. Uranium is extremely patient, as well as cesium and plutonium.
" We’re also seeing a rise in infertility in men and women,"
Mission Accomplished.
The headline gives a totally incorrect impression of who did what. It should read:
"Children Pay Ultimate Price of Poisonous Wartime Legacy of US in Iraq".
Green girl, absolutely right. The headline is misleading and blames the victim for the horrors inflicted on Iraq by the US and its lacky, NATO.
Since it is the Laura Bush hospital, do they make all the patients smoke a couple of packs of cigarettes a day?
I sure do hope so... The federal tax on cigarette tobacco is over three bucks an ounce. We need to pay off our Chinese loans.
Your readers should know about an Iraqi-born American oncologist who has paid a heavy price for sending food and medicine to the people of Iraq during the sanctions, "Humanitarian Pays With Life for Feeding the Children of Iraq:"
http://archive.truthout.org/humanitarian-pays-with-life-feeding-children-iraq68317
Remember according to former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of ten years of economic sanctions against Iraq was worth it in terms of the United States achieving it's foreign policy objectives. How much more so are the deaths of the of untold numbers of Iraqi's due to our invasion of Iraq and the current and future suffering of the children of Iraq due to the use of depleted Uranium worth given the benefits we obtained by overthrowing Saddam Hussein?
Clearly in the eyes of many in the United States, the benefits justified the risks.
It's not all bad news.
The half life of DU is (4.5) billion years. In another nine billion years, give or take a few thou, those trillions of microscopic specks of deadly DU will have decayed and will be relatively harmless, not entirely.
But by that time our sun will have become a red giant and then finally have collapsed into being a black hole, so I guess we won't be here to see the DU dust all cleaned up.
The bad news is, it will be killing kids and unborn kids for a long long time. And adults.
WayneWR,
Does our sun, which is a yellow dwarf, have sufficient mass to collapse into a black hole or is it more likely to become a neutron star?
dbl
I'm not sure Photius,
,
Some scientists believe it could become a black hole, there are billions of small black holes in the universe, many have recently been located in the Milky Way Galaxy and some giant black holes have been found, like the one in the center of our galaxy. The universe is actually a pretty scary place.
It doesn't really matter, as there will be no humans here on Earth to ever learn the answer. .
We luckily have a unique Water World, which developed a liveable atmosphere and is in orbit at at the proper distance from a star, or our sun, to support life.
We humans are sadly unfortunate to be so totally ignorant and utterly stupid, to destroy this Water World with DU and other deadly poisonous, human created atomic emissions and burn coal like Hell would not allow it and kill our ocean life with acidification and overload the upper atmosphere with potent greenhouse gases. When the ocean life dies, all life as we know life dies. We will be very sorry. The use of DU for weaponry is the most henious crime of all time... It is unforgiveable.
"If subeams were weapons of war, we would hav had solar energy centuries ago"
Sir George Porter,,, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry..
I like that comment.. He also could have mentioned geothermal energy... Without nuclear power, ther would have been no DU ammunition.
Having just read the first two or three googled listings on "depleted uranium" I am reminded of a similar "debate" that raged for many years and that many Viet vets will also recall: Agent Orange.
The current wikipedia article on DU reports that the US Army claims knowledge of NO cancers attributable to DU. They played the same game with Agent Orange.
Check wikipedia on Agent Orange: I am over word-count here, and thus need to delete the original quote...
The use of Depleted Uranium amounts to a generational escalation of this sort of GENOCIDE. At least two significant escalations are present:
1) Agent Orange was a chemical, and while its mutagenic effects may survive in the gene pool for generations in perhaps unknown ways, ultimately the chemical itself degrades and disappears from the environment. On the other hand, the DU residues persist for all practical human purposes forever.. All forms of uranium are biological toxins: the fact remains that, knowing that uranium in any form is a biological toxin, the United State government has used it to attack millions of people, as it did with Agent Orange.
2) If Agent Orange was used anywhere else than in SE Asia, I have no recollection of it. Today, the United States (and smaller players---unless Israel is actually a bigger player!) have used Depleted Uranium in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, maybe a fourth of Eastern Europe, and probably Somalia, Pakistan, GAZA... In other words, the United States is, as a matter of policy, irradiating selected human targets and geographic spaces, degrading their gene pool and their environment as a new form of Entropic Genocide, and our soldiers are collateral damage.
(And, as with Viet Nam, you will rarely see the personal wounds among you, except perhaps for close friends. Our government has become good at hiding the Domestic Wounds while the medical costs are hidden in the lies of our federal budget.)
A final point... The article(s) often speak to what is known as the "baseline" in medical literature, as in comparing the radiation bodyload pre- versus post- exposure to U.S. radioactive/cum uranium attacks. What they invariably have no space to remind is the fact that their "baseline" exposures to internal radiation threats are based on radiation medicine that evolved at any serious epidemiological level only in the later 1950s---AFTER atmospheric nuclear tests had already irremediably contaminated the worldwide gene pool. In other words, the "baseline" was already compromised. To find a true non-nuclear-contamination baseline would require finding internal radiation data on a significant human population prior to Alamagordo.
A few short decades ago, my Family Doctor and I actually discussed this stuff. He said, facetiously---but again and again and again, "the solution to pollution is dilution." In other words, the Plan(e)t Earth was expected to absorb the damage. If we killed off those big catfish in the Mississippi with chemical waste, there would still be fish upstream and down in the Gulf. He knew. Back then, what is happening today.
Depleted Uranium is essentially a "waste product" of the entire nuclear cycle, and it has become an active weapon against humans and our environment.
This has got to stop. This has got to stop.
Your Honor:
We will be filing a Cease and Desist Motion in the Court of Common Pleas... Our entire legal team will be Survivors of Agent Orange, and part of their argument will be Economic, to demonstrate HOW MUCH IT COSTS TO KEEP A WAR VET ALIVE so as to make a Real Contribution after years of reliving the Trauma. Of marrying too young in the desperation, of choosing bad jobs because there wasn't enough money, fighting with the wife mostly in the kitchen, over things like the goddam food bill while your booze and pot cost twice as much, and besides, you were the better cook after living in the jungle, and knew how to make a meal of a rat, tasty, but she refused even to taste it. You tried every love-trick in your book of lies and truths to make her wish to taste a well-cooked rat, but she would not be persuaded. Food for her came packaged at the grocery store, the supermarket, the Super Store, the Mega Control machine you could not provide, Soldier!
Where did the money come from to fight the divorce? Who wanted the children? Who had a job? Were the lawyers also trained in Social Work (as I was)? "I watched the best Minds of my generation..."
"Our kid is sick, Homer! Our house is worth less than the mortgage, Homer. The school is laying off good teachers, Homer, and they've cut the school bus budget in half and I have to break into work to get Athena back to Athens (Ohio!)...blah blah blah. Have to stop off and buy dinner, see you later Honey. And just so you remember, I can bake a biscuit better than any Siren, so hold on to your Mast," Mister.
Doubtless, some see where I am trying to go with this...
Having touched on toxics, dare I raise the question of the real nature of American Testosterone? The deep psychology here is, upon late reflection, truly frightening. For example, the Powers that Be were warned of the dangers of the isolation of Nuclear energy at least a century ago. Again, we lack a good baseline for the pre-nuclear nature of sperm (meanwhile, important to recall that the female is born with her eggs while the male creates sperm and this carries the immediate environment).
Were I a cynic, I would suspect that the guvment is forcing "evolution by induced mutation," and then skimming the results.
Cheap oil enabled gross overpopulation. Liberals seek alternative energy sources to avoid a global catastrophe. "Conservatives" seek near-zero change in the existing infrastructure. Meanwhile the banks are sitting on trillions in government cash. Which way will they go? This time!
Yes?
NO! Two years ago I predicted Romney. Wanna bet?
We vote for politicians who kill us and our progeny, kill millions of others, our "troops" come back disastified, and we wonder why our health-care system is failing, and they want to kill Medicare. True Medicine is overcome by its Billing System. It is called War.
It has got to Stop. ...We have known of Hubris for thousands of years. It is time to truly address it.
Am I a "socialist"? You betcha.
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