Five years after fierce battles left the Iraqi city of Falluja in ruins a surge in birth defects is raising questions about the weaponry used by US forces.
A heart breaking report by the BBC’s John Simpson screened on TV One on Friday. Simpson talked to doctors in the Falluja hospital who estimate around 1000 birth defects per year. You can hear his BBC radio report here. Late last year the Guardian reported Iraqi doctors had recorded a 15-fold increase in deformities in infants over the past year. Local medics were not ready to blame the war saying that there were many possible causes but a committee of Iraqi and British doctors has petitioned the UN General Assembly asking for an independent operation to clean up toxic materials left over from war.
The International Campaign to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) is concerned by the press reports and is calling on the US Government to clarify to what extent uranium weapons were used at Falluja, and to fund independent scientific research to establish the cause of the birth defects. It has long been thought that the use of depleted uranium weapons is linked with the rise in birth deformities and cancer and other illnesses after the wars in Iraq of 1991 and 2003.
Depleted uranium is nuclear waste. It is the by-product from processing uranium for nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. It is very hard and heavy and is inserted into ammunition for its armour-piercing properties. It ignites on impact, burning at a very high temperature, dispersing a cloud of radioactive dust which can pass through gas masks and into the human body.
The problem with this issue is that it is near impossible to conduct scientific experiments in a war zone during or after the battle. And military authorities (the US in this case) are not exactly transparent. The ICBUW advocates a precautionary approach and says depleted uranium weapons should be banned until definitive research has been done.
I agree. I have a member’s bill in the ballot that would prohibit the use of depleted uranium weapons in the same way that we ban nuclear weapons. New Zealand forces don’t use depleted uranium weapons but they could be exposed to them in the battlefield. If New Zealand was to follow Belgium, the only country in the world so far to ban DU weapons, it would be a helpful step towards outlawing such inhumane weapons.
A similar bill has just had its second reading in the Irish senate and attracted warm cross-party support.
Agreed.
Thank goodness that Phil Goff kept us out of Iraq!!! 
Yes – Same concern came was expressed from by friends who were refugees from Serbia. At the time (and still) many people did not know “Bunker Buster” was a euphemism for Nuclear. Is it odd that only one country has so far used nuclear weapons?
I would like to see that we retain full control of or military and civilian assistance, and be able to send a message “we will help, but we will not send our personal into a contaminated zone”. Send the refugees to somewhere safe first.
The Iraqi civilian body count is somewhere in the area of 100,000+.
While DU weapons are bad they are not responsible for that many deaths.
The Weapons That Kill Civilians – Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, 2003-2008
From http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Using the extensive and detailed database of Iraq Body Count (IBC), the researchers analyzed 14,196 events in which 60,481 civilians were violently killed during the first five years of the conflict in Iraq, thereby gaining an extraordinary overview of the harm that different weapons — from low to high tech — have brought to Iraq’s civilian population. Dr Madelyn Hicks of King’s College London, lead author of the article, said, “By linking a large number of deaths to the particular weapons used in specific events, the IBC database offers a unique opportunity for detailed analysis of the public health impact of different forms of armed violence on Iraqi civilians.”
For overall combined causes of civilian death from weapons in the data-set — ranging from gunfire, to improvised explosive devices used in roadside bombs, to precision-guided missiles — the average number killed per event was 4. However, the researchers found that when air-launched bombs or combined air and ground attacks caused civilian deaths, the average number killed was 17, similar to the average number in events where civilians were killed by suicide bombers travelling on foot (16 deaths per event).
Conventional non-DU weapons are just as bad as DU weapons. When guns and bombs go off people die. Banning arms sales altogether would be the best way to prevent harm to civilians and soldiers alike.
Does the report of extra deformities in births in Falluja match the expected health effects from the use of DU cannon shells. ( mainly by A10 attack aircraft) .
I understand the explosion of the shells causes the radioactive particles to be dispersed which then can be inhaled and damage is caused in the bronchial tree.
Birth defects implies genetic damage.
The text says the local medics say there could be many causes
A Plunket study of 4200in NZ in 93 found a rate of 4.3% . This indicates the Iraqi numbers could be in the order of 40%.
@ Patrick Andersen
two things.
1.) iraqbodycount is notoriously inaccurate because it only counts the deaths reported by official sources. It doesn’t count deaths from affects of the war like reduced water supply, contaminated water supply, refugees etc etc.
2.) The post is about increasing birth defects that could be attributed to increased radioactivity which would be directly linked to the use of depleted uranium.
@ Jeremy
One?
The problem, of course, is that DU weapons aren’t considered nuclear weapons under international law.
@ Draco – So who then has use them. ie taken the pistol from the holster and shot?
Only the US and the UK are known to have fired it in warfare. It was used in the 1991 Gulf War, in the 2003 Iraq War, and also in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s and during the NATO war with Serbia in 1999. While its use has been claimed in a number of other conflicts, this has not been confirmed.
http://www.cadu.org.uk/intro.htm
[...] used massive quantities of heavy munitions in its two attacks on the city 40 km from Baghdad. I posted last month on the chorus of calls by Iraqi doctors and international campaign groups for an [...]
“And military authorities (the US in this case) are not exactly transparent.”
Surely the US would be open to inspectors from the UN, allowing them to rifle through all their military records to look for DU, and other weapons of mass destruction, so we can clear them of using DU in Iraq??