[Peace-discuss] DU CASUALTIES

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com Poisoned? 
By JUAN GONZALEZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER 
Saturday, April 3rd, 2004 

Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are 
contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium 
shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found. 
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military 
Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last 
summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah. 
"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing 
cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness 
in my hands and rashes on my stomach." 
A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the 
company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from exploded 
American shells manufactured with depleted uranium. 
Laboratory tests conducted at the request of The News revealed traces of two 
manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the soldiers. 
If so, the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and 
Cpl. Anthony Yonnone - are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium 
exposure from the current Iraq conflict. 
The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops, firefighters and 
correction officers, is based in Orangeburg, Rockland County. Dispatched to Iraq 
last Easter, the unit's members have been providing guard duty for convoys, 
running jails and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due to return home 
later this month. 
"These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military 
police not exposed to the heat of battle," said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined 
the G.I.s and performed the testing that was funded by The News. 
"Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium 
exposure," said Duracovic, a colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the 
1991 Persian Gulf War. 
While working at a military hospital in Delaware, he was one of the first 
doctors to discover unusual radiation levels in Gulf War veterans. He has since 
become a leading critic of the use of depleted uranium in warfare. 
Depleted uranium, a waste product of the uranium enrichment process, has been 
used by the U.S. and British military for more than 15 years in some 
artillery shells and as armor plating for tanks. It is twice as heavy as lead. 
Because of its density, "It is the superior heavy metal for armor to protect 
tanks and to penetrate armor," Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said. 
The Army and Air Force fired at least 127 tons of depleted uranium shells in 
Iraq last year, Kilpatrick said. No figures have yet been released for how 
much the Marines fired. 
Kilpatrick said about 1,000 G.I.s back from the war have been tested by the 
Pentagon for depleted uranium and only three have come up positive - all as a 
result of shrapnel from DU shells. 
But the test results for the New York guardsmen - four of nine positives for 
DU - suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among 
coalition troops and Iraqi civilians. 
Several Army studies in recent years have concluded that the low-level 
radiation emitted when shells containing DU explode poses no significant dangers. 
But some independent scientists and a few of the ­Army's own reports indicate 
otherwise. 
As a result, depleted uranium weapons have sparked increasing controversy 
around the world. In January 2003, the ­European Parliament called for a 
moratorium on their use after reports of an unusual number of leukemia deaths among 
Italian soldiers who served in Kosovo, where DU weapons were used. 
I keep getting weaker. What is happening to me? 
The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium shrapnel or who 
are inside tanks during an explosion face measurable radiation exposure. 
But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the Knolls Atomic 
Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that DU-contaminated dust could travel for 
long distances. 
Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes, accidentally 
discovered that air filters with which he was experimenting had collected 
radioactive dust from a National Lead Industries Plant that was producing DU 26 
miles away. His discovery led to a shutdown of the plant. 
"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the topsoil from 52 
properties around the plant," Dietz said. 
All humans have at least tiny amounts of natural uranium in their bodies 
because it is found in water and in the food supply, Dietz said. But natural 
uranium is quickly and harmlessly excreted by the body. 
Uranium oxide dust, which lodges in the lungs once inhaled and is not very 
soluble, can emit radiation to the body for years. 
"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent 
dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who 
retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run ... veterans 
exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem." 
Critics of DU have noted that the Army's view of its dangers has changed over 
time. 
Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a 1990 Army report noted that depleted 
uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity 
causing kidney damage." 
It was during the Gulf War that U.S. A-10 Warthog "tank buster" planes and 
Abrams tanks first used DU artillery on a mass scale. The Pentagon says it fired 
about 320 tons of DU in that war and that smaller amounts were also used in 
the Serbian province of Kosovo. 
In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks from 
exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed by shrapnel, inhalation 
or handling battlefield debris. 
Some veterans groups blame DU contamination as a factor in Gulf War syndrome, 
the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of vets from that 
war. 
Under pressure from veterans groups, the Pentagon commissioned several new 
studies. One of those, published in 2000, concluded that DU, as a heavy metal, 
"could pose a chemical hazard" but that Gulf War veterans "did not experience 
intakes high enough to affect their health." 
Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said Army followup studies of 70 
DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious health effects. 
"For any heavy metal, there is no such thing as safe," Kilpatrick said. 
"There is an issue of chemical toxicity, and for DU it is raised as radiological 
toxicity as well." 
But he said "the overwhelming conclusion" from studies of those who work with 
uranium "show it has not produced any increase in cancers." 
Several European studies, however, have linked DU to chromosome damage and 
birth defects in mice. Many scientists say we still don't know enough about the 
long-range effects of low-level radiation on the body to say any amount is 
safe. 
Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, has called for 
identifying where DU was used and is urging a cleanup of all contaminated areas. 
"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant 
exposure to uranium oxide dust," said Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount 
Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium. "And the health impact is 
worrisome for the future." 
As for the soldiers of the 442nd, they're sick, frustrated and confused. They 
say when they arrived in Iraq no one warned them about depleted uranium and 
no one gave them dust masks. 
Experts behind News probe 
As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a nuclear 
medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, 
examined the nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police in late December and 
collected urine specimens from each. 
Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe 
University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes, performed 
repeated tests on the samples over a week-long ­period. He used a state-of-the art 
procedure called multiple collector inductively coupled plasma-mass 
spectrometry. 
Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability to identify 
and measure various uranium isotopes in minute quantities, Gerdes said. 
Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in their bodies. 
Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste product 
of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes in natural 
uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted. 
Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute traces of another 
uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only in a nuclear reaction process. 
"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the 
battlefield," Duracovic said. 
He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of the soldiers 
at the annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in 
Finland this year. 
When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the 
area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity. 


New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com Soldiers demand to know 
health risks 
By JUAN GONZALEZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER 
Saturday, April 3rd, 2004 

Doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recently told Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos 
that a biopsy revealed his rash comes from leishmaniasis, a disease spread by 
sandflies and contracted by hundreds of G.I.s in Iraq. 
Until last week, however, Army doctors refused requests by Ramos and a few 
others in the 442nd Military Police to have their urine analyzed for depleted 
uranium, a procedure that can cost up to $1,000. 
Three of the nine tested in the Daily News investigation - Sgt. Herbert Reed, 
Spec. William Ruiz, and Spec. Anthony Phillip - also were tested by the Army 
in November. But the results were withheld for months despite repeated 
inquiries. 
Last week, after Army officials received press inquiries about the 442nd and 
discovered that a group from the company had sought independent testing, an 
administrator at Walter Reed told Reed and Phillip that their tests from 
November had come back negative for depleted uranium. 
The News' tests also showed negative results for Reed and Phillip, but Ramos 
tested positive. The soldiers of the 442nd are not the only ones to raise 
questions about depleted uranium in Samawah. 
In August, a contingent of Dutch soldiers arrived in the town to replace the 
Americans. Press reports in the Netherlands revealed that Dutch authorities 
questioned the U.S. beforehand about the possible use of DU ammunition in 
Samawah. According to Sgt. Juan Vega, senior medic for the 442nd, the Dutch swept 
the area around the train depot with Geiger counters and their medics confided 
to him they had found high radiation levels. The Dutch unit refused to stay in 
the depot, Vega said, and pitched camp in the desert instead. 
And in February, after Japanese troops moved into the same town, a Japanese 
journalist equipped with a Geiger counter reported finding radiation readings 
300 times higher than background levels. 
"There'd been a lot of fighting in Samawah before we got there," said Staff 
Sgt. Ray Ramos, 41. "The place was dusty as hell, and the sandstorms were 
hitting us pretty good." 
Felled at first by what he thought was the sweltering Iraqi heat, Ramos 
expected to recover quickly. 
"My health just kept getting worse," he said. "I tried to work out each day 
to get through it but I kept getting weaker. A numbing sensation hit my hands 
and my face, and the migraine headaches became constant. I was afraid I was 
having a stroke." 
He was sent first to a Baghdad hospital for treatment, but with no 
neurologist available, he was shipped out to Germany and eventually to the U.S. 
"I had rashes on my stomach for four months," Ramos said. "And now, whenever 
I [lie] down, my hands fall asleep." 
Doctors at Walter Reed have been stumped. They've given Ramos braces to wear 
on his arms at night to try to prevent his hands from falling asleep, and 
they've prescribed a host of muscle relaxants and painkillers, but nothing seems 
to work. 
"I have four kids. What happens to them now if I can't work?" said Ramos, who 
was looking forward to a transfer from the NYPD Housing Bureau to the robbery 
unit in Brooklyn's 75th Precinct once he returns from active duty. "I need 
them to investigate what's going on with my body." 
Cpl. Anthony Yonnone, 35, a cop with the Veterans Administration in Fishkill, 
N.Y., has the highest DU levels of the four soldiers who tested positive, 
said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who performed the testing funded by The News. 
Yonnone said his nausea, skin rashes and migraines began in Samawah. "The 
headaches are constant and they don't want to stop," he said. "The rashes seem to 
come and go. 
"We were always passing blownout tanks when we were out doing patrols." 
He recalled that American units in the town burned trash and waste each night 
in big drums near the train depot. "The combination of smoke and sand when we 
lit those fires covered everybody," he said. 
Evacuated from Iraq in August for minor surgery, Yonnone was sent first to 
Germany. 
"They gave us a questionnaire. I marked that I wasn't exposed to depleted 
uranium because nobody had even told us what it was back in Iraq," he said.
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com Inside camp of troubles 
By JUAN GONZALEZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER 
Saturday, April 3rd, 2004 

The soldiers of the 442nd Military Police never heard of depleted uranium 
before they went to Iraq. 
They know only that inexplicable ailments have befallen them. 
Last year, more than a dozen of the company's soldiers were transferred back 
to Fort Dix for treatment of a variety of maladies. Frustrated with how the 
military was handling their concerns, they gave extensive interviews to the 
Daily News about their experiences, and nine of them eventually volunteered to be 
tested by a team of experts headed by Dr. Asaf Duracovic. 
According to the soldiers, most of them became sick last summer while 
stationed in ­Samawah, a town 150 miles south of Baghdad that was the scene of heavy 
combat in the first weeks of the war. 
Their unit entered the town in June, following short stays in Diwaniyah, 
Karbala and ­Najaf. They pitched camp at a huge, dusty, vermin-infested train 
depot on the outskirts of town. 
That's where, they claim, their problems began. 
"One night, I had 10 or 15 people with temperatures over 103, unexplained 
night chills, all kinds of things," said Sgt. Juan Vega, the company's principal 
medic. About a dozen of the 160 soldiers in the company suddenly developed 
kidney stones, he said. 
A 1990 Army study linked DU, to "chemical toxicity causing kidney damage." 
"I told our commander, 'We need to get the hell out of this place, there's 
something wrong with it,'" said Vega, 34, an FDNY paramedic. 
The soldiers recall that two Iraqi tanks, one all shot up, had been hauled 
onto flatbed railroad cars less than 100 yards from where the company slept. 
Pentagon officials have confirmed that tanks hit by DU shells are the biggest 
potential sources of battlefield radioactivity because when DU penetrators 
hit a target and explode, a fine aerosol of uranium oxide, or radioactive dust, 
is formed. The closer the tanks are to people, the greater the danger of 
inhaling the dust. 
In addition, a UN environmental report on Iraq warned last year of a "high 
risk of inhaling DU dust" within 150 meters of any target hit by DU shells 
"unless high-quality dust masks are worn." The soldiers never received dust masks.