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WHO Team to Study Effects of Depleted Uranium in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Aug 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A World Health Organization (WHO) team will arrive here Monday to explore the connection between depleted uranium (DU) and the increase of cancer and congenital diseases among the Iraqi people since the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. body said Thursday, according to news agency reports.
"A WHO delegation is expected in Baghdad on Monday to undertake, in cooperation with the Iraqi health ministry, a study on the effects of DU in Iraq," an official from the WHO office in Baghdad told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The official did not elaborate further on the mission, which is expected to take several months.
The U.N. body announced in April that a delegation from Iraq and WHO experts had drawn up a framework for future collaboration and action.
The framework covers three areas - surveillance of diseases - especially cancers - and congenital malformations, as well as DU measurements in affected people, plus prevention and research.
An online BBC report said that the eight-member WHO delegation would elaborate on the existing framework of the proposals.
DU is the residue left behind by the process of enrichment of ordinary uranium for use in nuclear weapons or reactors, BBC said, and is used in weapons to enhance their armor-piercing ability. DU weapons striking solid objects - such as tanks - explode into burning radioactive dust that can remain active for years.
Iraq has said the United States and Britain fired more than 940,000 armor-piercing DU projectiles during the 1991 conflict - a fact also confirmed by the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute.
Baghdad says that cancer rates have quadrupled in areas of southern Iraq, where most of the fighting during the Gulf War occurred, and where most of the allied bombings took place.
But Western sources say no scientific studies have yet shown a specific link between the use of DU shells and diseases, the BBC reported.
In a NATO briefing in January of this year, Daniel Speckhard, chairman of NATO's Ad Hoc Committee on Depleted Uranium, told reporters "no link has been established between depleted uranium and any forms of cancer."
The Committee was looking at the use of DU shells in the Balkan wars, and released findings reporting that there was no health hazard from their use, although some European countries, especially Italy, which also sent soldiers into the war, reported incidences of cancer among the soldiers who returned.
Numerous other studies have found far more suspicious evidence suggesting otherwise, especially in the case of Iraq - in both civilians from areas affected by bombing and U.S. soldiers who reported the controversial "Gulf War Syndrome" within the years after the war.
An appeal to the U.S. government to ban the use of DU weapons, drafted by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, said, "Of the 697,000 U.S. troops who served in the Gulf, over 90,000 have reported medical problems.
"Symptoms include respiratory, liver and kidney dysfunction, memory loss, headaches, fever, low blood pressure. There are birth defects among their newborn children."
Birth defects have also been reported among children in Iraq. A report by the Permanent Mission of Iraq to the U.N. Center for Human Rights said Iraqi specialists found that since the Gulf war, "there has also been a notable increase [in Iraq] in the incidence of congenital diseases and fetal deformities, such as the presence of additional abnormal organs, hydrocephaly, anencephaly, eye diseases, and even the total absence or deformity of eyes."
In the report, presented in Geneva in May 1996, the Mission noted that three American specialists from American organizations estimated that "fifty thousand Iraqi children had probably died during the first eight months of 1991 from various diseases, including cancer, kidney failure and previously unknown internal diseases, caused by the use of DU."
A statement at a 1997 session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights by a participating NGO said, "Scientific studies indicate if as much as one small particle [of DU] enters the lungs, the lungs and surrounding tissue will be exposed to 270 times the radiation permitted for workers in the radiation industry."
The statement, presented by the International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project, said that, "children and animals in the area are being born with the serious congenital anomalies and disabilities associated with low grade radiation poisoning."
Environmental groups and human rights workers and scientists have urged allied governments to stop using DU weapons, but as NATO Acting Spokesman Mark Laity said at the January briefing, "DU is not illegal. It is a legal weapon of war. End of story. We used it, it's legal."
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