[ RadSafe ] RE: Report of the Royal Society on the health hazards of DU munitions
John R Johnson
idias at interchange.ubc.ca
Thu Mar 9 13:39:10 CST 2006
Dr. Parthasarathy
I've reviewed the 2 Royal Society references you recommended and the summary
(Document 6/02, dated March 2002). I also looked at the report from the
Health Council of the Netherlands (Health risks of exposure to depleted
uranium, An overview, 2001) again.
I don't think there is anything in these reports that "proves" that depleted
uranium has a different non-radiological risk than natural uranium.
John
_________________
John R Johnson, Ph.D.
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*****
or most mornings
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-----Original Message-----
From: parthasarathy k s [mailto:ksparth at yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: March 7, 2006 5:43 PM
To: John R Johnson; Steven Dapra; radsafe at radlab.nl
Subject: RE: Report of the Royal Society on the health hazards of DU
munitions
Dear Dr.Johnson,
You may post your review of the royal society report on DU to all
radsafers. I feel sad that the issue was discussed with unwanted acrimony
because of an individual who appears to have a different agenda.
I did not have a chance to look at DU munition issues. The nearest I did
was when a few pieces of depleted Uranium used as shields/trimmers in
medical accelerators appeared in public domain. Many consider any element
ending with "ium" as radioactive. The news reports whipped up paranoia. In
one instance, the Du pieces were recovered from near Bhabha Atomic Research
Centre. News papers believed that it must have been stolen from the Centre;
actually it came out of two old medical accelerators imported in to India by
a private hospital and later sold as scrap.
Since the material was unusually heavy, those who received them thought
that it will be a very expensive material. They tried to sell it "secretly".
POlice got scent of it. Posession of urnium without a licence is illegal.
In yet another instance, police wanted to show that they did some smart
detective work. They loved to exaggerate the risks from handling uranium.
Police felt that they got contradictory advice from specialists. A medical
physicist who did not know the actual hazard of handling uranium took extra
ordinary precautions while advicing the police. He had an exaggearted sense
of the " precautionary priniciple". A health physicist who visited the scene
later gave the correct advice; police thought that he was foolhardy!
There were questions in Parliament. It was difficult to convince the lay
person that DU is not "bomb" making material. We prepared a note on the true
nature of the material and used it in TV spot interviews etc to inform the
uniformed.
Regards
K.S.Parthasarathy
John R Johnson <idias at interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
DR Parthasarathy
I will review these and respond. Would you like it copied to all
Radsafers?
John
_________________
John R Johnson, Ph.D.
*****
Pr! esident, 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: 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
Roo! m No 18, Ground Floor, North Wing
Vikram Sarabhai Bhavan
Mumbai 400094, INDIA
91+22 25555327 (O)
91+22 25486081 (O)
91+22 27706048 (R)
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 a! l. (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
LMC! A 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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