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depleted uranium debate continues

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2003 June 24 Tuesday.
The depleted uranium debate has lately heated up a little in Australia, with claims that Australian troops who served in this year's war in Iraq may have been contaminated with DU.

Today I checked out the transcript of a current affairs show from www.abc.net.au, an Australian broadcasting outfit. Today the transcript can be located at:-

www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s886719.htm

The show's presenter is a Linda Mottram, there's a reporter called Rachel Carbonell, and the transcript includes the following:-

RACHEL CARBONELL: United States and British forces used depleted uranium projectiles in both the 1991 Gulf War and in the recent military conflict in Iraq. In 1991 it is estimated US and British troops fired about 950,000 rounds, or more than 300 tonnes of depleted uranium weapons.

Michael Kilpatrick from the US Department of Defence Health Affairs section says so far there is no medical evidence that soldiers have suffered ill health as a result of exposure to these weapons.

MICHAEL KILPATRICK: We have looked at some 70 individuals who were in friendly-fire incidents, they were in Iran vehicles that were struck with depleted uranium. About a quarter of those still have small fragments of depleted uranium in their body and they're excreting very high levels of depleted uranium in their urine, and Dr Melissa McDermott, who is following those individuals, has not seen any untoward medical problems in these individuals due to their depleted uranium exposure.

The very bland "no problem" approach. I sat looking at this for a while and thinking about nothing in particular, when out of nowhere there floated into my mind the thought "lung cancer."

So I started poking round the Internet looking for statistics, and eventually I found something reasonably short and sweet at:-

www.nietrokers.nl/e/n01010.html

It's dated 1999 and it's about some "admittedly crude" research done by researchers who tried to figure out how much smoking cuts life. It says, in part:-

They calculated that smokers were likely to die 6.5 years earlier than non-smokers. They also worked out that if a man smokes the average number of cigarettes a year (5,772) from the average starting age of 17 until his death at 71 he will consume a total of 311,688 cigarettes. Based on these figures, each cigarette cost 11 minutes of life.

The point here is that, while smoking is admittedly bad for health, it does not result in people suddenly dropping dead. If you studied seventy people who started smoking at the time of the Persian Gulf War, back in 1991, then probably none of them would be dead yet.

What if the US Department of Defence Health Affairs was doing research on behalf of tobacco companies? If they came back and said, "Hey, we've studied seventy smokers for thirteen years and all seventy are doing okay" then would that be sufficient to reverse the world's opinion of the dangers of tobacco?

Meantime, if you look at the actual scientific research that's being done, none of it is reassuring. For example, tonight I ran my eye over an abstract which concludes that "These data suggest that uranium may be directly genotoxic and may, like chromium, react with DNA by more than one pathway."

The research in question seems to have been done by Yazzie M, Gamble SL, Civitello ER and Stearns DM of the Department of Chemistry, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, and the abstract dated April 2003, which has a headline saying "Uranyl acetate causes DNA single strand breaks in vitro in the presence of ascorbate (vitamin C)," can be found:-

here

It's worth quoting what the article mentions about the unknowns involved:-

"Acute exposures to uranium are chemically toxic to the kidney; however, little is known about chronic exposures, for example, if there is a direct chemical genotoxicity of uranium. The hypothesis that is being tested in the current work is that hexavalent uranium, as uranyl ion, may have a chemical genotoxicity similar to that of hexavalent chromium."

The above is particularly relevant in the light of the bland statements from the US military which say, more or less, "Sure, we know this stuff can damage the kidneys, but our guys are okay in the kidney area."

Anyway, the abstract gave me another groovy search term to play with, "uranyl acetate."

If you go to Google and punch "uranyl acetate" into the search box then you get something like 7,800 results, and I think tonight I've gone as far as I can.

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