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News :: Regime |
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Radiation Is 1,000 Times The Normal Levels Where US Troops Used Depleted Uranium Shells In Baghdad |
Current rating: 0 |
by Democracy Now! via rporter
Email: rporter (nospam) newtonbigelow.com (verified) |
17 May 2003
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A discussion with the Christian Science Monitor's Scott Peterson, who visited four randomly chosen sites in Baghdad and reports that while women and children haven't been warned, US troops have orders to avoid the sites. |
An article in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor begins like this:
At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks.
But Ms. Hamid's stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by - and contaminated with - controversial American depleted-uranium bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road.
No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout.
Those are the words of journalist Scott Peterson in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor. Peterson reported extensively on the trail of toxic war debris. In 1999, he wrote a series of articles on the effects of DU bullets used in the first Gulf War and in the war in Kosovo.
You can listen to an interview with Scott Peterson at the Democracy Now! website:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/16/160254
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Re: Radiation Is 1,000 Times The Normal Levels Where US Troops Used Depleted Uranium Shells In Baghdad |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: -2
17 May 2003
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As I have mentioned before, if you would like to locate the US depleted uranium shells, you may wish to look inside the burned out remains of Iraqi tanks. We don't miss.
Just a suggestion,
Jack |
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Re: Radiation Is 1,000 Times The Normal Levels Where US Troops Used Depleted Uranium Shells In Baghdad |
by susanne
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
29 May 2003
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There are many things that you use on a daily basis that have 1000x more radioactivity then background, but you just probably never bothered to check, or to be informed about whether or not it actually poses a health risk. |
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Re: Radiation Is 1,000 Times The Normal Levels Where US Troops Used Depleted Uranium Shells In Baghdad |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
29 May 2003
Modified: 02:19:06 PM |
The issue is "Can low-level radiation be assumed to be safe?"
The answer is "No, there is no conclusive proof of that."
For instance, Wolfgang Kohnlein writes:
"Newer studies reported 0.05 Sv as the doubling dose for leukemia, lung cancer and other cancer forms while the official estimates in interagency reports are still well over 1 Sv.
"This again suggests that the actual risks are more than 20 times the official ones. The agencies responsible for setting radiation protection standards refuse to use the new data for risk estimates because to there opinion the older data like the Japanese A-bomb data is the best available. There is, however, no biostatistical warrant for this claim. From a scientific standpiont a population of healthy worker who never been exposed to high doses of radiation is much more informative than a population of sick persons or survivors of the A-bomb who may have been exposed to one Sv and more. Continuous and concurrent dosimetry for monitoring uranium miners, nuclear dockyard workers and workers in other nuclear facilities is far superior to retrospectve dosimetry that is based on assumptions which are now in serious question. Finally, good statistical practice says that you never extrapolate far beyond the range of the data when good data in the right range is available.
"With the much better data and direct risk estimates available today, scientific evaluation of radiation risks should replace the obsolete older estimates by the newer ones. That this did not happen in the latest reports of the official commissions suggests that official estimates are no longer a scientific product but rather a political one."
See: http://www.foe.arc.net.au/kohnlein/kohnpaper.html
For more information on the risks of being complacent about low-level radiation:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/poison/cover.htm
http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1996/jf96/jf96gordon.html
http://www.ratical.com/radiation/inetSeries/index.html#ES
http://www.rerf.or.jp/
Finally, US veterans of atomic testing and their families, banded together in the National Association of Atomic Veterans, assert that there is no safe level of ionizing radiation: http://www.naav.com/
To read their stories, visit:
http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/ |
