Grisly legacy of the bombs on Baghdad

Posted by Roz Paterson on September 1, 2006. Filed under International,Iraq. Posted with the tags:Iraq
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This is Mohammad Mushtak. He is one month old, and the effects of uranium poisoning are clearly visible on his tiny body.

His mother told the Voice’s Baghdad correspondent Isam Rasheed that she lived near one of the sites the US bombed using shells tipped with Depleted Uranium (DU).

“The doctor told her that her body had been affected by the uranium during her pregnancy. Mohammad is her only child, and she is distraught that he is so badly affected by the uranium.”

DU poisoning is one of the great, underreported stories of the US presence in Iraq, dating back to 1991, when they first used the banned substance to firebomb Iraqi vehicles as they retreated from Kuwait.

Those vehicles remain where they fell, on the so-called “Highway of Death”, emitting radioactivity. The US dropped similar weapons on sites across Southern Iraq and since then, the incidence of cancer, kidney problems, autoimmune disease and horrendous birth defects has sky-rocketed.

Depleted Uranium is a by-product of the process of separating fissionable uranium (used to make nuclear weapons) from natural uranium. DU remains radioactive for 4.5billion years, which means the Iraqi population are doomed to this horror for generations to come.

Uranium dust

DU comes with another hazard. Upon impact, it disperses into a fine, ceramic uranium dust that is scattered by the wind and is absorbed by the human body, where it enters tissues, blood and organs.

For adults, this has been linked with the development of respiratory disease, neurological abnormalities, chronic kidney complaints, lymphomas and various skin and organ cancers. It is also linked to uranium in semen and sexual disfunction and birth defects.

For children, the consequences of exposure to DU are even worse.

An epidemic of swollen abdomens in Southern Iraq, caused by kidney problems, is believed to have been caused by this dust.

As for pregnant women, there is a terrible implication in that uranium dust can enter the body and cross the placental barrier, affecting the unborn child.

Birth defects, including babies born without brains, with internal organs on the outside of their bodies, without sexual organs or spines, have surged since the early 1990s, from 11 in every 100,000 in 1989, to 116 in every 100,000 in 2001. Doctors in Southern Iraq could only compare what they witnessed with the birth defects seen in the wake of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Cancer rates have also accelerated, especially amongst children. Leukaemia experienced a 100 per cent increase in incidence between 1990 and 1999. Cancers in children have risen in general by 242 per cent for the same period.

Poverty

Poverty, malnutrition and stress obviously exacerbate these problems, as does the catastrophic shortage of medical facilities and drugs to treat the children wasting away in hospital beds with deadly cancers and birth defects that make any kind of life ultimately unsustainable.

“Mohammad’s family is very poor,” says Isam.
“His father is a taxi driver who cannot work just now, as armed militias control the Baghdad streets and anyway, he cannot afford petrol for his car. They live in his mother’s house and his wife has no job.”
Because of this, they cannot afford to send him to Amman for the medical treatment he desperately needs. It is not available in Iraq.
“I hope we can find the help Mohammad needs.”