Here is Dr. Bishop's reply http://www.roundupnews.com/news/393603.html?mkey=49552

By Don BishopLevi Hill's recent article relating to the health hazards associated with depleted uranium exposure (the Round Up, March 10) is both erroneous and misleading. For example, the United States is one of four nations that manufactures and sells depleted uranium weapons worldwide. At least 20 countries (including Saudi Arabia and Israel) have them in their arsenals. Also, the half-life of depleted uranium is 4.5 billion years, much longer than that of any plutonium isotope.

Hill's article correctly points out how effective uranium tipped projectiles are for piercing armor and destroying tanks and bunkers. It is no small wonder the military will do everything in its power to keep these weapons at their disposal. Depleted uranium is also used as armor in U.S. tanks due to its very high density, subjecting the occupants to continual radiation exposure.

Hill cites Professor Adrian Hanson as ascribing health problems of Gulf War veterans and Iraqi civilians to chemical warfare agents used by Saddam Hussein. This is a widely held, self-serving myth propagated by the U.S. military and the State Department. No credible evidence exists that Iraq used chemical agents during the Gulf War. On the other hand, their maladies, as well as those reported by veterans from the Bosnia/Serbian conflict, closely mirror ailments experienced by victims of secondary radiation exposure from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that are described in a 1961 Japanese journal chronic fatigue and listlessness; deterioration of memory; dizziness, headaches and sleeplessness; numbness of hands and feet and joint deformities; leukemia; lymphomas; goiter; liver and kidney malfunction; and increased likelihood of miscarriages, stillborns, and unusual deformities in surviving offspring. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, only the military would call it a turkey.

Hanson was cited as comparing the cancer risk of inhaled uranium (formed as aerosol particles when a depleted uranium shell explodes into a tank) to that of smoking cigarettes, a known health hazard, and as suggesting that the health deterioration from deleted uranium exposure would take many years to develop. However, if the mass burden of inhaled radioactive substances in the lungs is large enough, health effects are known to appear quite soon, even within hours. This is because ionizing radiation consists of electrically charged "bullets" that can penetrate an inch or more into the body tissue. Their electrical charge creates a wake of destruction all along their paths, thus causing much more damage than exposure to chemical toxins or electromagnetic radiation (to which ionizing radiation is often mistakenly compared).

One milligram of depleted uranium, a possible body-burden mass in terms of aerosols inhaled by front-line troops, produces over one million alpha particles and two million beta particles (from its decay products) every day. The chance of irreparable biological damage from some of these over the decades that depleted uranium remains in the lungs is quite significant -- just when depends on the laws of statistical probability.

What's more, as the depleted uranium dissolves into the bloodstream over the years, it migrates to other organs of the body. The majority finds its way to the kidneys, leading to nephritis; some settles more permanently in the lymph glands and bone, where the ravages of ionizing radiation can cause lymphoma and leukemia, chronic anemia and slow destruction of the immune system. Because detectable damage depends on probabilities, there can be no practical threshold below which exposure to ionizing radiation is harmless. This fact explains why four identically exposed individuals may develop quite different maladies or none at all.

I wonder if Hanson's conclusions might have been different if he was aware that both the U.S. Department of Energy and NATO military have admitted on separate occasions that depleted uranium is contaminated by nuclear waste from nuclear reactors -- waste that includes plutonium (one of the most toxic substances known to man), americium, neptunium and other trans-uranium elements. I wonder if his reliance on the 1999 RAND report for information (which says depleted uranium causes few, if any, health problems) might have been different had he taken note of the fact that this report, a literature review, was sponsored, financed and edited by the U.S. Department of Defense, not exactly an unbiased resource.

Thanks

David

www.PeaceAware.com