[News] Poisoned?

[News at freedomarchives.org]

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

Poisoned?
By JUAN GONZALEZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, April 3rd, 2004

Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq
are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium
shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.

They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military
Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that
began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.

"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn
housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant
numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach."

A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the
company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from
exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.

Laboratory tests conducted at the request of The News revealed traces of two
manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the soldiers.

If so, the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and
Cpl. Anthony Yonnone - are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted
uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict.

The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops, firefighters and
correction officers, is based in Orangeburg, Rockland County. Dispatched to
Iraq last Easter, the unit's members have been providing guard duty for
convoys, running jails and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due
to return home later this month.

"These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military
police not exposed to the heat of battle," said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who
examined the G.I.s and performed the testing that was funded by The News.


"Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium
exposure," said Duracovic, a colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the
1991 Persian Gulf War.

While working at a military hospital in Delaware, he was one of the first
doctors to discover unusual radiation levels in Gulf War veterans. He has
since become a leading critic of the use of depleted uranium in warfare.

Depleted uranium, a waste product of the uranium enrichment process, has
been used by the U.S. and British military for more than 15 years in some
artillery shells and as armor plating for tanks. It is twice as heavy as
lead.

Because of its density, "It is the superior heavy metal for armor to protect
tanks and to penetrate armor," Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said.

The Army and Air Force fired at least 127 tons of depleted uranium shells in
Iraq last year, Kilpatrick said. No figures have yet been released for how
much the Marines fired.

Kilpatrick said about 1,000 G.I.s back from the war have been tested by the
Pentagon for depleted uranium and only three have come up positive - all as
a result of shrapnel from DU shells.

But the test results for the New York guardsmen - four of nine positives for
DU - suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among
coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.

Several Army studies in recent years have concluded that the low-level
radiation emitted when shells containing DU explode poses no significant
dangers. But some independent scientists and a few of the ­Army's own
reports indicate otherwise.

As a result, depleted uranium weapons have sparked increasing controversy
around the world. In January 2003, the ­European Parliament called for a
moratorium on their use after reports of an unusual number of leukemia
deaths among Italian soldiers who served in Kosovo, where DU weapons were
used.

I keep getting weaker. What is happening to me?


The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium shrapnel or who
are inside tanks during an explosion face measurable radiation exposure.

But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the Knolls Atomic
Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that DU-contaminated dust could travel
for long distances.

Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes,
accidentally discovered that air filters with which he was experimenting had
collected radioactive dust from a National Lead Industries Plant that was
producing DU 26 miles away. His discovery led to a shutdown of the plant.

"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the topsoil from 52
properties around the plant," Dietz said.

All humans have at least tiny amounts of natural uranium in their bodies
because it is found in water and in the food supply, Dietz said. But natural
uranium is quickly and harmlessly excreted by the body.

Uranium oxide dust, which lodges in the lungs once inhaled and is not very
soluble, can emit radiation to the body for years.

"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent
dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who
retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run ...
veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem."

Critics of DU have noted that the Army's view of its dangers has changed
over time.

Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a 1990 Army report noted that depleted
uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical
toxicity causing kidney damage."

It was during the Gulf War that U.S. A-10 Warthog "tank buster" planes and
Abrams tanks first used DU artillery on a mass scale. The Pentagon says it
fired about 320 tons of DU in that war and that smaller amounts were also
used in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks from
exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed by shrapnel,
inhalation or handling battlefield debris.

Some veterans groups blame DU contamination as a factor in Gulf War
syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of vets
from that war.

Under pressure from veterans groups, the Pentagon commissioned several new
studies. One of those, published in 2000, concluded that DU, as a heavy
metal, "could pose a chemical hazard" but that Gulf War veterans "did not
experience intakes high enough to affect their health."

Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said Army followup studies of 70
DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious health effects.

"For any heavy metal, there is no such thing as safe," Kilpatrick said.
"There is an issue of chemical toxicity, and for DU it is raised as
radiological toxicity as well."

But he said "the overwhelming conclusion" from studies of those who work
with uranium "show it has not produced any increase in cancers."

Several European studies, however, have linked DU to chromosome damage and
birth defects in mice. Many scientists say we still don't know enough about
the long-range effects of low-level radiation on the body to say any amount
is safe.

Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, has called for
identifying where DU was used and is urging a cleanup of all contaminated
areas.

"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant
exposure to uranium oxide dust," said Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at
Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium. "And the
health impact is worrisome for the future."

As for the soldiers of the 442nd, they're sick, frustrated and confused.
They say when they arrived in Iraq no one warned them about depleted uranium
and no one gave them dust masks.


Experts behind News probe


As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a
nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted
uranium, examined the nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police in late
December and collected urine specimens from each.

Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe
University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes,
performed repeated tests on the samples over a week-long ­period. He used a
state-of-the art procedure called multiple collector inductively coupled
plasma-mass spectrometry.

Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability to identify
and measure various uranium isotopes in minute quantities, Gerdes said.

Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in their bodies.
Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste
product of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes
in natural uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted.

Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute traces of
another uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only in a nuclear reaction
process.

"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the
battlefield," Duracovic said.

He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of the
soldiers at the annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear
Medicine in Finland this year.

When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the
area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity.


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