[CPEO-MEF] URANIUM WEAPONS, HEALTH:

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Depleted Uranium Weapon Use Persists, Despite Deadly Side Effects
War and the Tragedy of the Commons, Part 5

by: H. Patricia Hynes
Truthout
August 25, 2011

By 2003, reports were surfacing of cancer clusters and birth  
disorders in conflict areas of the Balkans and Iraq, raising fears  
about human exposure to depleted uranium (DU) and its fate and  
transport in war environments. Gulf War Syndrome, a catchall for  
mysterious and disabling symptoms and conditions suffered by nearly  
40 percent of 540,000 veterans of the three-week ground war (which  
killed fewer than 200 US soldiers), remained an unyielding conundrum.  
A colleague and I prepared a fact sheet on depleted uranium, given  
its first use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and growing use by the  
United States and Britain in subsequent wars. We labored in a meager  
research environment and detected an unsettling complacency around  
the question of  environmental health impacts of DU munitions.

Little governmental research on Gulf War veterans was being conducted  
other than a small study on 29 veterans with DU metal shrapnel  
fragments in their bodies, cancer cluster reports were dismissed as  
anecdotal and alarmist, and DU was pigeonholed as "weak" and "feeble"  
radiation with no predictable risk. Thus, the US decision to use DU  
in weapons was made in an environment of uncertainty and intentional  
ignorance about the health risks to those exposed in conflict and  
post-conflict situations.  Accustomed to policing and polluting  
everyone's backyard, the Department of Defense (DoD) still maintains  
a shroud of secrecy around depleted uranium, as it has with abandoned  
hazardous waste contaminating military bases and countries in which  
our government has waged war.


...

For the entire article, see
http://www.truth-out.org/depleted-uranium-weapon-use-persists-despite- 
deadly-side-effects/1313781795

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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