The following link may be of interest:

 http://www.un.org/ha/chernobyl/unsceare.htm

Thyroid cancer is associated with iodine 131, which is not present in DU and has a half life measured in days.

Was sent the following articles by a friend.

The Campaign Against Depleted Uranium, Bridge 5 Mill, 22a Beswick Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 7HR // Tel./Fax.: +44 (0)161 273 8293 // E-Mail  info@cadu.org.uk // Website:  http://www.cadu.org.uk


 http://www.futurenet.org/25environmentandhealth/rokke.htm
The War Against Ourselves
An Interview with Major Doug Rokke
Doug Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally trained as a forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he was assigned to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, and sent to the Gulf. What he experienced has made him a passionate voice for peace, traveling the country to speak out. The following interview was conducted by the director of the Traprock Peace Center, Sunny Miller, supplemented with questions from YES! editors.


QUESTION: Any viewer who saw the war on television had the impression this was an easy war, fought from a distance and soldiers coming back relatively unharmed. Is this an accurate picture?

ROKKE: At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back to the United States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty count of 760: 294 dead, a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the casualty rate now for Gulf War veterans is approximately 30 percent. Of those stationed in the theater, including after the conflict, 221,000 have been awarded disability, according to a Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued September 10, 2002.

Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium munitions friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces.

We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium dust, anybody working in and around uranium contamination, and anyone within a vehicle, structure, or building that's struck with uranium munitions. That's thousands upon thousands of individuals, but not only US troops. You should provide medical care not only for the enemy soldiers but for the Iraqi women and children affected, and clean up all of the contamination in Iraq.

And it's not just children in Iraq. It's children born to soldiers after they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you've got uranium in the semen, the genetics are messed up. So when the children were conceived-the alpha particles cause such tremendous cell damage and genetics damage that everything goes bad. Studies have found that male soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a child with a birth defect and female soldiers almost three times as likely.

Q: You have been a military man for over 35 years. You served in Vietnam as a bombardier and you are still in the US Army Reserves. Now you're going around the country speaking about the dangers of depleted uranium (DU). What made you decide you had to speak publicly about DU?

ROKKE: Everybody on my team was getting sick. My best friend John Sitton was dying. The military refused him medical care, and he died. John set up the medical evacuation communication system for the entire theater. Then he got contaminated doing the work.

John and Rolla Dolph and I were best friends in the civilian world, the military world, forever. Rolla got sick. I personally got the order that sent him to war. We were both activated together. I was given the assignment to teach nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare and make sure soldiers came back alive and safe. I take it seriously. I was sent to the Gulf with this instruction: Bring 'em back alive. Clear as could be. But when I got all the training together, all the environmental cleanup procedures together, all the medical directives, nothing happened.

More than 100 American soldiers were exposed to DU in friendly fire accidents, plus untold numbers of soldiers who climbed on and entered tanks that had been hit with DU, taking photos and gathering souvenirs to take home. They didn't know about the hazards.

DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10 pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it's like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw tremendous burns, tremendous injuries. It was devastating.

The US military decided to blow up Saddam's chemical, biological, and radiological stockpiles in place, which released the contamination back on the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The chemical agent detectors and radiological monitors were going off all over the place. We had all of the various nerve agents. We think there were biological agents, and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities. It was a toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to this whole mess.

When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in northern Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours. Respiratory problems, rashes, bleeding, open sores started almost immediately.

When you have a mass dose of radioactive particulates and you start breathing that in, the deposit sits in the back of the pharynx, where the cancer started initially on the first guy. It doesn't take a lot of time. I had a father and son working with me. The father is already dead from lung cancer, and the sick son is still denied medical care.

Q: Did you suspect what was happening?

ROKKE: We didn't know anything about DU when the Gulf War started. As a warrior, you're listening to your leaders, and they're saying there are no health effects from the DU. But, as we started to study this, to go back to what we learned in physics and our engineering-I was a professor of environmental science and engineering-you learn rapidly that what they're telling you doesn't agree with what you know and observe.

In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick. Respiratory problems and the rashes and neurological things were starting to show up.

Q: Why didn't you go to the VA with a medical complaint?

ROKKE: Because I was still in the Army, and I was told I couldn't file. You have to have the information that connects your exposure to your service before you go to the VA. The VA obviously wasn't going to take care of me, so I went to my private physician. We had no idea what it was, but so many good people were coming back sick.

They didn't do tests on me or my team members. According to the Department of Defense's own guidelines put out in 1992, any excretion level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result in immediate medical testing, and when you get up to 250 micrograms of total uranium excreted per day, you're supposed to be under continuous medical care.

Finally the US Department of Energy performed a radiobioassay on me in November 1994, while I was director of the Depleted Uranium Project for the Department of Defense. My excretion rate was approximately 1500 micrograms per day. My level was 5 to 6 times beyond the level that requires continuous medical care.

But they didn't tell me for two and a half years.

Q: What are the symptoms of exposure to DU?

ROKKE: Fibromyalgia. Eye cataracts from the radiation. When uranium impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust and pieces of uranium explode all over the place. This can be breathed in or go into a wound. Once it gets in the body, a portion of this stuff is soluble, which means it goes into the blood stream and all of your organs. The insoluble fraction stays-in the lungs, for example. The radiation damage and the particulates destroy the lungs.

Q: What kind of training have the troops had, who are getting called up right now-the ones being shipped to the vicinity of what may be the next Gulf War?

ROKKE: As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed a 40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has been shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that's full of distortions. It doesn't deal with the reality of uranium munitions.

The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified that the gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits leak. Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects can be fixed with duct tape.

Q: If my neighbors are being sent off to combat with equipment and training that is inadequate, and into battle with a toxic weapon, DU, who can speak up?

ROKKE: Every husband and wife, son and daughter, grandparent, aunt and uncle, needs to call their congressmen and cite these official government reports and force the military to ensure that our troops have adequate equipment and adequate training. If we don't take care of our American veterans after a war, as happened with the Gulf War, and now we're about ready to send them into a war again-we can't do it. We can't do it. It's a crime against God. It's a crime against humanity to use uranium munitions in a war, and it's devastating to ignore the consequences of war.

These consequences last for eternity. The half life of uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the place in Iraq.

We also bombarded Vieques, Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation for the war in Kosovo. That's affecting American citizens on American territory. When I tried to activate our team from the Department of Defense responsible for radiological safety and DU cleanup in Vieques, I was told no. When I tried to activate medical care, I was told no.

The US Army made me their expert. I went into the project with the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because I'm a warrior. What I saw as director of the project, doing the research and working with my own medical conditions and everybody else's, led me to one conclusion: uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the US or the Canadians or the British or the Germans or the French but for the American citizens of Vieques, for the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa, of Scotland, of Indiana, of Maryland, and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.

Q: If your information got out widely, do you think there's a possibility that the families of those soldiers would beg them to refuse?

ROKKE: If you're going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you know you're going to wear gas masks and chemical protective suits that leak, and you're not going to get any medical care after you're exposed to all of these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and nobody came. You've got to start peace sometime.

Q: It does sound remarkable for someone who has been in the military for 35 years to be talking about when peace should begin.

ROKKE: When I do these talks, especially in churches, I'm reminded that these religions say, "And a child will lead us to peace." But if we contaminate the environment, where will the child come from? The children won't be there. War has become obsolete, because we can't deal with the consequences on our warriors or the environment, but more important, on the noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the contamination and the health effects of war can't be cleaned up because of the weapons you use, and medical care can't be given to the soldiers who participated in the war on either side or to the civilians affected, then it's time for peace.


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For more information on DU, see the WISE Uranium Project, www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/; the National Gulf War Resource Center, www.ngwrc.org; or Veterans for Common Sense, www.veteransforcommonsense.org. Sunny Miller's interview was originally broadcast on WMFO (Boston) in November 2002 and is available for re-broadcast at www.traprockpeace.org.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3050317.stm
Afghans' uranium levels spark alert

By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent

Thursday, 22 May, 2003
A small sample of Afghan civilians have shown "astonishing" levels of uranium in their urine, an independent scientist says.

Critics suspect new weapons were used in Afghanistan
He said they had the same symptoms as some veterans of the 1991 Gulf war.

But he found no trace of the depleted uranium (DU) some scientists believe is implicated in Gulf War syndrome.

Other researchers suggest new types of radioactive weapons may have been used in Afghanistan.

The scientist is Dr Asaf Durakovic, of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC), based in Canada.

Dr Durakovic, a former US army adviser who is now a professor of medicine, said in 2000 he had found "significant" DU levels in two-thirds of the 17 Gulf veterans he had tested.

In May 2002, he sent a team to Afghanistan to interview and examine civilians there.

The UMRC says: "Independent monitoring of the weapon types and delivery systems indicate that radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads were being used by the coalition forces." There is no official support for its claims, or backing from other scientists.

Shock results

It says Nangarhar province was a strategic target zone during the Afghan conflict for the deployment of a new generation of deep-penetrating "cave-busting" and seismic shock warheads.

The UMRC says its team identified several hundred people suffering from illnesses and conditions similar to those of Gulf veterans, probably because they had inhaled uranium dust.

Bomb damage was widespread

To test its hypothesis that some form of uranium weapon had been used, the UMRC sent urine specimens from 17 Afghans for analysis at an independent UK laboratory.

It says: "Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination.

"The results were astounding: the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999.

"If UMRC's Nangarhar findings are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster... Every subsequent generation is at risk."

It says troops who fought in Afghanistan and the staff of aid agencies based in Afghanistan are also at risk.

Scientific acceptance

Dr Durakovic's team used as a control group three Afghans who showed no signs of contamination. They averaged 9.4 nanograms of uranium per litre of urine.

The average for his 17 "randomly selected" patients was 315.5 nanograms, he said. Some were from Jalalabad, and others from Kabul, Tora Bora, and Mazar-e-Sharif. A 12-year-old boy living near Kabul had 2,031 nanograms.

Troops and aid workers could be at risk

The maximum permissible level for members of the public in the US was 12 nanograms per litre, Dr Durakovic said.

A second UMRC visit to Afghanistan in September 2002 found "a potentially much broader area and larger population of contamination". It collected 25 more urine samples, which bore out the findings from the earlier group.

Dr Durakovic said he was "stunned" by the results he had found, which are to be published shortly in several scientific journals.

Identical outcome

He told BBC News Online: "In Afghanistan there were no oil fires, no pesticides, nobody had been vaccinated -- all explanations suggested for the Gulf veterans' condition.

"But people had exactly the same symptoms. I'm certainly not saying Afghanistan was a vast experiment with new uranium weapons. But use your common sense."

The UK Defence Ministry says it used no DU weapons in Afghanistan, nor any others containing uranium in any form.

A spokesman for the US Department of Defense told BBC News Online the US had not used DU weapons there.

He could not comment on Dr Durakovic's findings of elevated uranium levels in Afghan civilians.

My parent live next to a bombed family house in Baghdad. Fearing the doubl savagery of the USA/UK;this is not just against the living now but against the next generations I have asked my neighbour over the telephone to cover up the bombed site to prevent further damage from the radoactive particules. I have asked him to talk to the civil defence or the red cresent or cross. But he said to me that an american officer has assured him that DU has never been used in the conflict. It seems my neighbour has beleived the american. When insisting that he should find a gager counter and find out for himself, the telephone line went dead. This was three weeks ago.