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How to increase your risk of exposure to depleted uranium
Read the last paragraph.
-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
3050 Traymore Lane
Bowie, MD 20715-2024
E-mail: jenday1@email.msn.com (H)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Putnam, Israel (OD/ORS)
> Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 12:10 PM
> To:
> Subject: In medical news today-
>
> Italian Study Seeks Link Between Depleted Uranium Exposure and Cancer
>
> FLORENCE (Reuters Health) May 10 - The link between depleted uranium and
Hodgkin's disease may be biologically proven by the end of the year,
according to researchers at Modena's Policlinico Hospital in Italy.
> Appointed by the Ministry of Defence, the researchers, led by Dr. Giuseppe
Torelli, have begun a study of 16 Italian soldiers who developed Hodgkin's
lymphoma after returning from the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and
Kosovo.
> "At the moment we are focusing on possible p53 mutations. This gene is
often defective in cancer, but not in Hodgkin's disease. Finding variations
in the soldiers' p53 gene or in other genes particularly receptive to
environmental changes would imply a carcinogenic exposure," Dr. Mario Luppi,
one of the hematologists working on the project, told Reuters Health.
> The controversy over the high incidence of cancer cases among Italian
soldiers resurfaced on Tuesday as Defence Minister Antonio Martino announced
that a scientific report on the issue will be published shortly.
> "Hodgkin's lymphoma is more widespread among the Italian soldiers who were
in the Balkans than in the national population and even more than in
soldiers from other countries who were in the same area," Martino told
reporters. This is the first time that the government acknowledged the
unusually high number of cancer cases among the Italian peacekeepers in the
Balkans.
> "The anomaly must very serious and evident if the defence minister finally
admitted it. Obviously, he wanted to prepare us to a shocking report," Falco
Accame, President of the Ana-Vafaf Association for those killed and injured
in the armed forces told Reuters Health. Accame is also the former President
of the Defence Committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies.
> At least 13 Italian soldiers have died of cancer since serving in Bosnia,
Kosovo, and Macedonia, sparking a national outcry which caused the defence
ministry to set up a commission of enquiry on December 22, 2000.
> The investigative panel, headed by Dr. Franco Mandelli, studied 28 cases
of cancer from December 1995 through January 2001 in 39,450 soldiers. Last
year, the commission report concluded that hemolymphatic malignancies were
no more common in Balkan-based Italian troops than in the national
population and said there is no proven link between depleted uranium and
cancer in soldiers.
> "Those findings were marked by gross statistical mistakes," Accame said.
"They calculated the risks for all the soldiers who went to the Balkans
during that period, and not in those military really exposed to the risk.
The reason why so many are sick is simple: in Bosnia, as well as in Somalia
and in Kosovo for the first 5 months, our soldiers were left in T-shirts,
totally unprotected."
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