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?