[ RadSafe ] depleted uranium arms and birth defects

[Xiurong Liu]

On Wednesday, 6 July 2005, James Salsman wrote:

> That uranium accumulates in the testes and leads to birth defects
> has been established as fact since the 1950s.  But does the
> resulting birth defect incidence rate increase over time in an
> accelerating fashion as it has been in Basrah? 

I believe Mr. Salsman is referring to the data published at this link:

http://www.irak.be/ned/archief/Depleted%20Uranium_bestanden/DEPLETED%20URANIUM-2-%20INCIDENCE.htm

Is the accelerating trend in Table 1 cause for alarm?  
Have there been other *reproductive* toxins or toxicants to which 
the residents of Basrah, Iraq are known to have been exposed?

> Our armed forces don't even bother to look; if they did, they
> would at the very least break 1991 combat-deployed ODS veterans
> out in this report:
>  http://www.bovik.org/du/mscusn/BIHR_annual_report_2000.pdf

I find all the files in that www.bovik.org/du/mscusn/ directory very 
interesting, especially in the context of the transmittal.pdf file.

This report, published in 1993, indicates several substantial and 
statistically significant increases in deployed versus nondeployed
Gulf War veterans:

http://www.bovik.org/du/mscusn/BD_Infants_GWV_AR_AZ_CA_GA_HI_IA_1989-1993.pdf

Yet, the BHIR_annual_reports for 1998-2000 do not show Gulf 
War veterans in a separate category, even though the report 
numbers on all apparently indicate a planned '05' publication date.  

If the correlation is known, why not study it?  A large number of 
different categories are provided without, apparently, any attempt 
to study the known largest epidemiological correlations in those 
three annual reports

That reeks of politics at the expense of science, and of a blatant 
cover up.