I read this article this morning and just can’t get it out of my mind. Gives a different perspective to the Schiavo case also. It is so sickening, this theater being played at the US Congress and all this talk about the right to live and family values and bla, bla, bla……
Talk about WMD’s. Americans will be remembered for a long time in Iraq for their Uranium Depleted Bombs, as in Vietnam for Agent Orange – but why is this topic being ignored? How many more children with deformations will have to be born before we note? How much more has the cancer rate in Iraq to increase? Where is the right to live for this children? Where is the right to live a healthy life for these children?
Information collected for a German project investigating the use of uranium-charged ammunition in Iraq shows that when Iraqi women fear for their children’s health, it is with good reason.
After two wars where oil wells were torched, chemical factories bombed and radioactive ammunition fired, the first thing Iraqi women ask when giving birth is not if it is a boy or a girl, but if it is normal or deformed. The number of cancer cases and children born with deformities has skyrocketed after the two Gulf Wars.
“Since 1991 the number of children born with birth deformities has quadrupled,” said Dr. Janan Hassan, who runs a children’s clinic at a hospital in Basra in southern Iraq. “The same is the case for the number of children under 15 who are diagnosed with cancer. Mostly, it is leukemia. Almost 80 percent of the children die because we neither have medicine nor the possibility to give them chemotherapy.”
Doctors have also recorded an extreme rise in cancer cases among adults. “In 2004 we diagnosed 25 percent more cancer cases than the year before and the mortality rate increased eight-fold between 1988 and 1991,” said Dr. Jawad al-Ali of the Sadr Hospital in Basra.
But it’s not just the DU amunition.
In Iraq, burning oil wells, bombed chemical factories, demolished production sites for chemical weapons and even the use of radioactive ammunition are just a few of the things which may have triggered diseases there.
I believe this should also be a topic for Americans, as there has been talk about the Gulf War sickness afflicting US Veterans and I have now doubt also current soldiers serving currently in Iraq.
P.S. how does one link correctly?
And even sadder is the fact that I knew almost nothing about this. When is the idiotic SCLM going to start reporting real news, real facts?
Never? I thought so. {sigh}
PS – to make a link, do this:
< a href = http://www.insertaddresshere.com > Title of Link </ a>
Just take out all of the spaces, of course! There should be none. For example, if I did the above for this place, I would put in the address after the href tag and equal sign, then the title between brackets is Booman Tribune. It comes out looking like this:
Booman Tribune
Hope that helps!
Will try it out next time.
get firefox, and the dKos extension. Though I have taken to fondly calling it the BooMan extension.
the daily kos extension. I have used firefox but don’t know that term.
Took me a while to find it. I’ve copied the link.
Right click. At the top of the box is dKos html.
I click it. New box. Click hyperlink. Box jumps up. Paste link in, click ok. This appears.
< a href=” htt p:/ww w. acromedia. com/dev/mozilla” > </ a>
Then just type the words you want to apear as the link >here<
Preview. Always preview. Check link.
Wa la!
Now, where’s that dictionary extension? There is one. And a cool mousie thing….here.
DU’s impact on our own soldiers and their families.
11,000 US Soldiers Dead from DU Poisoning
http://www.sfbayview.com/012605/headsroll012605.shtml
“”He added, “Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead! By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of ‘Disabled Vets’ means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems!” The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam.””
Iraq Regime Admits US Used Mustard, Nerve Gas In Fallujah – Forums powered by Reason and Principle
Dr Khalid ash-Shaykhli, a representative of the puppet so-called ‘Iraqi ministry of health’ who was authorized to assess the health conditions in al-Fallujah after the end of the major battles there, announced that the surveys and studies that a medical team did in al-Fallujah and then reported to the ‘ministry’ confirm that US forces used substances that are internationally prohibited – including mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals – in the course of its attacks on the city.
Thanks for the links. Sad story, at least the US soldiers, hopefully, someday can leave Iraq and return home to a safe environment, that is if this administration hasn’t destroyed it by then, and maybe even get treated. The Iraqi’s will have to stay.
DIANE! I was trying to fix your link but found I couldn’t edit your post without deleting it … so here is what you wrote, with the link now embedded. (I’m hoping that makes the page not so wide.)
Re: And this (none / 0)
Sorry, forgot to put the link
http://peopleforchange.blogspot.com/
by diane101
(Hope this works.)
As you may know, the US and NATO used vast amounts of depleted uranium in their assault against the Serbs. I live downwind of the battle sites. I’ll let you know when an uptick in deformed babies hits the local media. Should be soon.
Yes, heard about that, however, there was never an in-depth reporting either, maybe because the NATO and thus European countries were involved too.I hope the DU was not used in the same amount as in Iraq. As far as I know no chemical weapons have been used in Serbia. Looking at the desaster in Chernobyl, it seems that the radiation effect stayed relatively local whatever that means. Hopefully with the DU this will be the same. I get angry trying to argue like this, even locally is bad enough.It is frustrating, this ignorance and careless with our health and the environment.
When will world get politicians that care about humanity. We sure could use a few Gandhi’s.
After responding to your comment I searched on google about the DU, amazingly there were only 55 links. The more official looking one say of course that DU is no problem at all, some tell stories and some are just strange. All in all, not much information on DU available.
If you look for DU and Serbia there are only 8 links left and some of the strange too.
http://www.google.ch/search?q=DU%3B+uranium+depleted+ammuntion%3B+&hl=en&lr=&start=0&
;sa=N
I only searched for English links.
I did not really have the time to thoroughly explore this site but it does seem to have an awful lot of information both pro and anti.
Thank you for the link, I will look into it, looks like quite a bit of information. Wouldn’t it just be nice if there was no war ever.:-)
There would be neither a need to discuss this kind of topic.
As a pharmacist, I’ve been concerned about the health care impact of this war in a number of ways, including the DU/cancer/mutagenesis problem and the high number of people who will be returning to the US with PTSD. Not to mention that entire generations of Iraqis will be affected by the fact that we have turned their country into a nuclear waste dump.
I don’t beleive we don’t have the healthcare infrastructure here to deal with the magnitude of the problem we are creating with DU/Iraq, and given the propensity of this administration to cut healthcare benefits (ie, Medicaid, Veterans funding), I think we are in for a hell of a problem a few years from now, and one that will get a lot worse before it gets better.
I hadn’t seen the latest numbers of GWI veterans, but I knew it was pretty high. Still, I am surprised by the exact numbers, and wish more people were aware of the “hidden” costs of this war.
Check out Gulf War Vets.com