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Ear to the Ground

Soldiers Sue Army Over Mysterious Illness

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Posted on Aug 13, 2006

A number of American troops from the same unit in Iraq recently discovered they were all suffering from a mysterious set of illnesses.  Though their doctors couldn’t determine the source of the sickness, the soldiers came to believe their exposure to depleted uranium munitions was to blame, and decided to sue the U.S. Army.


Wired News:

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it—thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The United States has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

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By Dusty R, August 15, 2006 at 5:00 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Well, as i’ve shown, the evidence from the objecitve research facilities shows it is -NOT- an issue.

Debate IAEA, NATO, etc.

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By Mystified, August 14, 2006 at 7:12 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

I don’t know what kind of propaganda some people read but DU has been proven to be quite hazardous a very long time ago. If DU really were harmless, do you seriously think it would need special storages?

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By Dusty R, August 14, 2006 at 5:57 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Lets get real: time and time again DU has been found to not be an issue. DU in Kuwait? no issue. In Kosovo? no issue. Used in Chechnya by Russian forces? no issue. But why is there an issue in Iraq, and Iraq only? Simply enough: The environment has been badly scared, chemically, by enormous amounts of sarin and mustard gas exposure during Iraq’s brutal years with Saddam.

To Further prove DU isnt’ an issue, I post:
http://www.nato.int/du/ - To date, the scientific and medical research continues to disprove any link between Depleted Uranium and the reported negative health effects.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/docs/b04151999_bt170-99.htm - RAND REVIEW INDICATES NO EVIDENCE OF HARMFUL HEALTH EFFECTS FROM DEPLETED URANIUM

http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2003/13-571089.shtml - An IAEA investigation in Kuwait has found that depleted uranium (DU) from munitions used in the 1991 Gulf War does not pose a radiological hazard to the people of Kuwait.

http://www.vethealth.cio.med.va.gov/Pubs/1303.4hk 9-02-04.pdf - While no clinically significant adverse effects of DU have been evident to date in this group, some abnormalities have been detected on specialized testing.

And, a good overview: http://www.deploymentlink.osd.mil/du_library/balkans.shtml - None of the investigations and assessments has found widespread DU contamination, elevated uranium in the urine of veterans, or a significant health risk to deployed forces or to the public.

Dusty R

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By Spinoza, August 14, 2006 at 12:47 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

DU might become a major problem. Something has to explain all of the birth defects and infant cancers in southern Iraq.

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By Frank Delgado, August 14, 2006 at 12:41 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

be all you can in the us army including radioactive.

  Ten years from now the govt will acknowledge exposure and will start paying out ten years after that when 90% of those expose are dead.

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