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Iraq sees alarming rise in Cancers, Deformed Babies |
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Written by Suadad al-Salhy
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Thursday, 03 December 2009 10:42 |
 The guns are gradually falling silent in Iraq as a fragile stability takes
hold, turning the spotlight on a stealthier killer likely to stalk Iraqis for
years to come.
Incidences of cancer, deformed babies and other health problems have risen
sharply, Iraqi officials say, and many suspect contamination from weapons used
in years of war and accompanying unchecked pollution as a cause.
'We have seen new kinds of cancer that were not recorded in Iraq before war in
2003, types of fibrous (soft tissue) cancer and bone cancer. These refer clearly
to radiation as a cause,' said Jawad al-Ali, an oncologist in Iraq's second city
of Basra.
In the city of Falluja in western Iraq, scene of two of the fiercest battles
between U.S. troops and insurgents after the 2003 U.S. invasion, a spike in the
number of births of stillborn, deformed and paralysed babies has alarmed
doctors.
The use of depleted uranium in US and coalition weaponry in the 1991 war to
liberate Kuwait and the 2003 Iraq invasion is well documented, but establishing
a link between the radioactive metal and health problems among Iraqis is hard,
officials say.
Iraqi medical facilities are limited, and keeping accurate health statistics
during years of sectarian slaughter unleashed by the invasion was impossible.
In Basra in particular, pummelled by years of war and swamped with industrial
and agricultural pollution, it is difficult for doctors to isolate specific
causes for cancer.
Its people have for years lived among mounds of scrap metal that include war
debris, the brown rust flaking off into the wind and carried into peoples homes,
food, and lungs.
'Our information indicates there are more than 200 square kilometres of land
south of Basra containing war debris, some of which is contaminated with
depleted uranium,' said Bushra Ali, of the Environment Ministry's radiation
prevention department.
A 2007 Basra University medical journal report found 'no major rise' in cancer
death rates, but that the proportion of children dying of cancer in Basra had
jumped 65 percent in 1997 and 60 percent in 2005, compared to 1989.
Children suffering most?
Depleted uranium, a dense metal, is used in weaponry to pierce heavy armour such
as on tanks. Linking it to ill health is controversial -- the British Ministry
of Defence says there is “no reliable scientific or medical” evidence.
Large quantities of depleted uranium were used in the first Gulf War, some of it
near Basra.
It is not clear how much, if any, was used in Falluja by U.S. troops fighting
mostly house-to-house battles in two assaults on the city in 2004.
The U.S. military did, however, use white phosphorous, which can cause serious
burns if it comes in contact with skin, to mark targets or to flush enemy gunmen
out of their hideouts.
Five years later, doctors in Falluja are recording an unusual number of babies
with congenital heart disease and neural tube defects, the latter involving
abnormal spinal cord or brain development, which can cause paralysis and death.
'The marked increase of congenital malformations of newborns in this hospital
pushed the hospital's board of directors to form a special committee to
investigate and record these cases,' said Abdulsatar Kadim, manager of Falluja's
main hospital.
Doctors say they have not been able to isolate a specific cause. Several factors
can trigger the condition, including a lack of folic acid during pregnancy.
A neural paediatric specialist, who declined to be named, said he was seeing on
average three or four newborns with neural tube defects a week in Falluja and
its surrounding areas, a region with a population of about 675,000 people.
In Britain, the incidence of the condition is less than 1 birth in every 1,000.
Most births in and around Falluja are at its main hospital, where up to 30 are
recorded daily, roughly equating to a neural tube defect rate of 14 in every
1,000.
'Some families decide to end the matter from the beginning. They choose to end
the life of child, by refusing surgery for them -- 90 per cent of the children
whom we don't treat die in the first year,' said a Falluja doctor who declined
to be named.
Source: Reuters
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