[ RadSafe ] RE: Report of the Royal Society on the health hazards of DU munitions

Tue Mar 7 14:39:41 CST 2006

DR Parthasarathy

I will review these and respond. Would you like it copied to all Radsafers?

John
 _________________
John R Johnson, Ph.D.
*****
President, IDIAS, Inc
4535 West 9-Th Ave
Vancouver B. C.
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(604) 222-9840
idias at interchange.ubc.ca
*****
or most mornings
Consultant in Radiation Protection
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  -----Original Message-----
  From: parthasarathy k s [mailto:ksparth at yahoo.co.uk]
  Sent: March 7, 2006 8:12 AM
  To: John R Johnson; Steven Dapra; radsafe at radlab.nl
  Subject: Report of the Royal Society on the health hazards of DU munitions

  Dear Dr.Johnson,

  Let me give you a very useful reference on the health impact of DU
munitions by the Royal Society; Its URL is

  http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/landing.asp?id=1243

  The report was published in two parts . The titles were:

  1. The health hazards of depleted uranium munitions Part I (May 2001)

  2. The health hazards of depleted uranium munitions Part II  (March 2002)

  You may also read the clarifications issued  in April 2003. The links for
it is avilable at the above URL.

  I request your comments in light of other references

  Regards

  K.S.Parthasarathy Ph.D
  (Formerly Secretary, Atomic Energy regulatory Board)

  Raja Ramanna fellow
  Department of Atomic Energy
  Strategic Planning Group
  Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences
  Room No 18, Ground Floor, North Wing
  Vikram Sarabhai Bhavan
  Mumbai 400094, INDIA
  91+22 25555327 (O)
  91+22 25486081 (O)
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  Mobile 9869016206

  John R Johnson <idias at interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
    Steven and other Radsafers

    I have found that the WHO report on DU is useful reference. Details are
at

    http://who.int/publications/en/
    [PDF] 1 Depleted uranium: sources, exposure and health effects
    Page 1. 1 Depleted uranium: sources, exposure and health effects
Executive
    summary This sc! ientific review on depleted uranium is ...
    www.who.int/entity/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/en/DU_Eng.pdf

    John
    _________________
    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
    *****
    or most mornings
    Consultant in Radiation Protection
    TRIUMF
    4004 Wesbrook Mall
    Vancouver B. C.
    V6R 2E2
    (604) 222-1047 Ext. 6610
    Fax: (604) 222-7309
    johnsjr at triumf.ca

    -----Original Message-----
    From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl]On
    Behalf Of Steven Dapra
    Sent: March 6, 2006 7:31 PM
    To: radsafe at radlab.nl
    Subject: Re: answers (was Re: [ RadSafe ] James Salsman, DU, and
    peer-reviewed literature)

    March 5

    James Salsman wrote:

    Thanks to Steven Dapra for his excellent questions. [You are welcome.]

    > How many of the quotes you offered did you read from the primary
    > sour! ce material?

    James Salsman:
    Those that include URLs to full text I have read in full; of the
    others, I have read the abstract of Kang, et al. (2000) and McDiarmid,
    et al. (2006). As far as I can remember, these sources were all
    suggested either by MEDLINE, the Science Citation Index searches, emails
    from people, emails from stored searches, or references in other
    articles. Citations to papers by Schott, Durakovic, and McDiarmid all
    appear in some of the anti-DU literature I have seen, but the 2006
    article I haven't seen cited anywhere but MEDLINE yet. Thank you for
    your excellent summary. I wonder where the congenital malformations are
    coming from if the chromosome abberations are as low as are suggested.

    Steven Dapra:

    Since you have read seven of the papers, and the two abstracts,
    how could you possibly come up with all those carefully manipulated
    quotes? And how did you manage to so cleverly extract those eight
wordsfrom Durakovic's review paper? How did you do what you did with the
Miller
    et al. paper? (The ninth one in your list. [Journal of Inorganic
    Biochemistry])

    You wrote: "Abstract: 'chemical generation of hydroxyl radicals by
    depleted uranium in vitro exceeds radiolytic generation by one
    million-fold....' "

    I replied: "There is no sentence in the Abstract that is in any way
    similar to the one Salsman quotes, nor is there any sentence in the
paper
    that is similar to it. Salsman's quote appears to be a patchwork quilt
of
    two or three sentences from the Abstract."

    *How* did you manage to piece that together? (Not that I want to
    imitate you, I am only curious.)

    I don't know what "congenital malformations" or low chromosome
    aberrations you are talking about.

    > How do any of these papers show criminal negligence?

    James Salsman:
    I am not an attorney. The legal questions of gross negligence include:
    Should those w! ho approved pyrophoric DU munitions have known, or
should
    they reasonably have been expected to know, that uranium is teratogenic,
    at the time they approved of the munitions?
    What regulations then governed the use of poisons?
    Would a reasonable person have been expected to approve a weapon which
    poisons civilians off of the battlefield, after the battle is over?
    How many members of the civilian families of U.S. troops have been
    injured by the teratogenicity of uranium combustion products?

    Steven Dapra:

    You wrote, " . . . dozens of those who were supposed to have been
    responsible have in fact been criminally negligent . . . ."

    If you are "not an attorney" how can you even claim that "dozens .
    . . have IN FACT been criminally negligent"? (Emphasis added.) You have
    convicted these "dozens" without so much as naming them, let alone
having
    them go through a trial, when a jury is supposed to hear the evidence,
    consider the fac! ts, and then decide if anyone is guilty of anything. I
am
    not an attorney either, and I know about innocent until proven guilty.
You
    have also switched from "criminal" negligence to "gross"
    negligence. What's with that?

    Are you suggesting that using uranium (DU) is wrong because it is
    a suspected teratogen? It is well established that live ammunition and
    high explosive shells and bombs kill people outright. Why not ban them
    instead of bemoaning the presence of a possible teratogen? That doesn't
    make a whole lot of sense, does it?

    Civilians have been killed on and off the battlefield, caught in
    crossfires, and so forth since the beginning of warfare. I think your
    questions here are somewhat on the self-righteous side. Soldiers and
    civilians both get killed in wars. I don't like it either, but it is an
    unfortunate fact of life.

    The number of injured U.S. civilian families is unknown, and may
    never be known. Sheer conjecture abo! ut this is certainly no basis for
    accusing anyone of criminal (or gross) negligence.

    > Can it be shown that enlistment rates have fallen as a result of
    > DU exposure?

    James Salsman:
    It is my opinion that, yes, this is easy to show. A poll of college
    students from military families could be used to answer this question,
    but I know of no such poll in existing literature. I note the rise
    of such groups as "Leave My Child Alone," which did not exist during
    the time of the first Gulf War, as far as I know.

    Steven Dapra:

    You plainly implied that the use of DU weapons had a "resulting
    effect on enlistment rates and thus national security." A reasonable
    person would construe your closing comments, and this phrase, as a
    statement that the use of DU weapons had directly caused a decrease in
    enlistments in the Armed Services. The implication was that the decrease
    had already happened, not that it would be "easy to show." I ! have not
    heard of Leave My Child Alone. I know there are some groups that opposed
    Service recruiters having access to high school children, and I imagine
    LMCA is one of them. More than likely this stems from a general
opposition
    to war, and in particular to the current war in Iraq. I seriously doubt
    that any group was formed to oppose Service recruiting solely because of
    the use of DU weapons. I am not a statistician, however I suspect it
would
    be impossible to prove that enlistments have fallen solely because of
the
    use of DU weapons.

    Steven Dapra
    sjd at swcp.com

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