[SPAM]RE: [ RadSafe ] Re: DU and cancer causation

Sat Aug 12 12:56:55 CDT 2006

Actually, with an N of 1, it does prove that inhaled and ingested uranium
above background levels is not universally immediately toxic nor is it
universally carcinogenic.  In a separate post Dan McCarn provides a good
summary of what the consensus opinion on depleted uranium is.

If the media were completely fair (an unattainable standard by the way
because fair is subjective), your friend's experience would receive the same
emphasis as the individual assertions that their illnesses were caused by
DU.

Eric Daxon

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] On Behalf
Of John R Johnson
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 5:30 PM
To: jjcohen at prodigy.net; Roger Helbig; radsafelist
Subject: [SPAM]RE: [ RadSafe ] Re: DU and cancer causation

Jerry et al

NO! All it proves it that not all people have the same risk.

 _________________
John R Johnson, Ph.D.
*****
President, IDIAS, Inc
4535 West 9-Th Ave
Vancouver B. C.
V6R 2E2
(604) 222-9840
idias at interchange.ubc.ca
*****

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl]On
Behalf Of Jerry Cohen
Sent: August 11, 2006 2:17 PM
To: Roger Helbig; radsafelist
Subject: [ RadSafe ] Re: DU and cancer causation

Debra Hastings relates a truly sad story suggesting that DU causes cancer. I
know of a gentleman who worked for 20 years in uranium processing during
which time he was exposed to DU on several occasions. He is now 85 years old
and in excellent health for someone his age. Doesn't that prove DU is
harmless??

Roger Helbig <rhelbig at california.com> wrote:
  A small very committed group of activists have gotten their message out to
the point where the mainstream media are asking questions,

Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 6:54 AM
Subject: [DU Information List] are depleted uranium weapons sickening U.S
troops

Are Depleted Uranium Weapons Sickening U.S. Troops? By Deborah Hastings
AP National Writer
August 10, 2006
NEW YORK (AP) - It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange
juice to wash down all the pills - morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant,
an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. And
Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut
the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before
the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is
more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his
eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere,
itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his
skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure
what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone
caring for him that the military's new favorite weapon has made him
terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has
many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist,
a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist.
He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they
exact a high price.

"I'm just a zombie walking around," he says.

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now
walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it - thousands
of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive,
chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through
butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it
repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust
with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for
nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as
natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting
in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful
and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in
Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk
because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then
began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his previously
healthy life.

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy
from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life
between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says. "The doctors said,
'It's all in your head.' "

Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made
eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard
unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York
area.

But the medic knew something the others didn't.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty,
which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell
casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices.
The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert
rather than live in the station ruins.

"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching depleted
uranium."

Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated
urine tests available only overseas.

Then they hired a lawyer.
Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony
Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their
urine, according to tests done in December 2003. For months during that
time, they bounced between Walter Reed and New Jersey's Fort Dix medical
center, seeking relief that never came.

The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a
depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology
at the University of Leicester in Britain.

The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S.
Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed
the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and
not that worrisome.

Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA.
Those results were negative, Reed said. "Their test just isn't as
sophisticated," he said. "And when we first asked to be tested, they told us
there wasn't one. They've lied to us all along."

The VA's testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More
than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only eight
had DU in their urine, the VA said.

The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the
words can prompt a strong reaction. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are
yelled from all sides.

"The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for
breakfast and it poses no threat at all," said Steve Robinson of the
National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various
problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. "Then you
have far-left groups that ... declare it a crime against humanity."

Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it
during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and
Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous
method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by
getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel,
which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than
leaving it.

Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is
doubly dangerous - not only are the particles themselves physically
destructive, they emit radiation.

A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a
doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has
studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before leaving
the military as a conscientious objector.

"I've been working on this since '93 and I've just given up hope," he said.
"I've spoken to successive federal committees and elected officials ... who
then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes."

At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet
proselytizers who say using such weapons constitute genocide. Two of the
most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile, not
a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.

"The bottom line is it's more hazardous than the Pentagon admits," Fahey
said, "but it's not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it is.
And there's a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans."

Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to them,
and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians' offices. It is
something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like
so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.

But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans like
Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern
Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.

Some days he feels fine. "Some days I can't get out of bed," he said from
his home in Colorado.

Now 29, he's had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small
stroke - one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his
face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.

"Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it," he said. "Except I
couldn't move the right side of my body."

After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.

He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from
a series of "non-related conditions." He knows he was exposed to DU.

"A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that
was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were
rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles."

No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His
knowledge, like Reed's, is self-taught from the Internet.

Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn't feel up to the
fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory
in battle.

He'd really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel
the same.

"I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape.
Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they're in as good as shape as a
professional athlete," he said. "Then we come back and we're all sick."

They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time,
with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.
C 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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