DEPLETED URANIUM SYNDROME - VETS DENIED MEDICAL CARE

by WhiteHorseRider, Sunday, August 22, 2004, 00:40

First the U.S. government used AGENT ORANGE in Vietnam. Exposure to it during that war, has made many U.S. Veterans, and many Vietnamese very ill.

Now, the Bush administration has been using DEPLETED URANIUM ordinance in this war in Iraq all along. The cases of severe illness and death are starting to be reported. And the higher-ups in our government are starting to try, again, to cover it all up. IT HAS BEGUN....

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AMERICAN FREE PRESS.NET

DU Syndrome Stricken Vets Denied Care

Pentagon Hides DU Dangers to Deny Medical Care to Vets
By Christopher Bollyn

Far from the radioactive battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, another war is being waged. This war, over the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons, is being fought between the military top brass and the men who understand the dangers of DU: former military doctors and nuclear scientists.

This war is for the truth about uranium weapons, and the consequences of their use, and has been waged for more than 13 yearsâ€"since the U.S. government first used DU weapons against Iraq. Most Americans, however, are unaware of this historic struggle, because the Pentagon has used its power to prevent information about DU from reaching the public.

John Hanchette, editor of USA Today from 1991 to 2001, in a recent interview with anti-DU activist Leuren Moret, said he had written several news stories about the effects of DU on gulf wars veterans. Every time he was ready to publish a story about the devastating illnesses afflicting soldiers, however, the Pentagon called USA Today and pressured him not to publish the story. Hanchette was eventually replaced as editor and now teaches journalism to college students.

Dr. Doug Rokke, 37-year Army veteran and former director of the Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, has become an outspoken “warrior for peace” in the war against DU weapons.

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“Anyone who demands medical care and environmental remediation faces ongoing and blatant retaliation,” Rokke told AFP. “Anybody who speaks upâ€"their career ends.”

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The military records of one of Rokke’s comrades, who suffers from the effects of DU exposure, have been completely “gutted” from Army archives, Rokke told AFP.

“They [defense officials] willfully ignore existing Department of Defense directives that require prompt and effective medical care be provided to ‘all’ exposed individuals,” Rokke says.

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“Today,” Rokke writes, “although medical problems continue to develop, medical care is denied or delayed for all uranium-exposed casualties while Defense Department and British Ministry of Defense officials continue to deny any correlation between uranium exposure and adverse health and environmental effects.”

Rokke said the individuals at the Department of Defense are engaged in a “criminal” conspiracy to deny the toxicity of DU weapons. “The lies by senior Defense Department officials are designed to sustain use of uranium munitions and avoid liability for adverse health and environmental effects,” he said. According to Rokke, a recent Gulf War Review reported that only 262 vets had been treated for DU poisoning through September 2003.

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“The CDC is going to do a whitewash on DU,” Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore Lab, said. Fulk told AFP he had received this information directly from CDC officials.

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The ATSDR fact sheet: “The radiation damage from exposure to high levels of natural or depleted uranium are [sic] not known to cause cancer.”

“No apparent public health hazard,” the CDC assessment of Livermore lab, published June 29, said about local exposure levels to tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, Fulk said.

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DU is very radioactive, however. While one gram of U-235 emits 81,000 alpha particles per second, U-238 emits 12,000 per second. These high-energy particles coming from DU particles lodged in the body cause the most damage, according to Fulk and others.

“Depleted uranium dust that is inhaled gets transferred from the lungs to the regional lymph nodes, where they can bombard a small number of cells in their immediate vicinity with intense alpha radiation,” said Dr. Asaf Durakovic, former Pentagon expert on DU.

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“Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably the ground troops [who] re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armor-piercing (DU) munitions,” SAIC published in its July 1990 magazine.

“Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer,” SAIC wrote.

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Painful breathing and respiratory problems are the first and most common symptoms of DU inhalation, Rokke said. Dr. Janette Sherman told AFP she met a 31-year-old female former soldier at a Maryland veteran’s hospital who had recently served in Kuwait. Sherman, a toxicologist, was shocked when the young woman told her that she required a lung transplant.