Thursday, January 4 8:26 PM SGT
Uranium shells row revives mystery of Gulf War syndrome
http://sg.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=singapore/headlines/010104/world/afp/Uranium_shells_row_revives_mystery_of_Gulf_War_syndrome.html
PARIS, Jan 4 (AFP) -

A controversy that has erupted over depleted uranium shells used by NATO forces in the Balkans is likely to revive questions about the baffling array of illnesses besetting veterans of the 1991 Gulf War.

Six Italian soldiers who served in the Balkans have died from leukaemia, five fatal cases of cancer have been detected among Belgian soldiers and several leukaemia cases have been reported among Dutch veterans.

France also said on Thursday that four of its troops who had served in the region had leukemia.

Victims' relatives say depleted uranium shells, used as tank- or bunker-busting munitions by the Western alliance, contaminated the soldiers, placing them into contact with toxic fragments or dust that later caused cancer.

NATO insists there is no evidence to suggest the shells posed a health hazard to friendly troops, but -- pressed by several anxious alliance members -- has agreed to examine use of these weapons.

According to NATO's view, the shells have negligible radioactivity and in any case are transformed by impact into a scorching vapour. Any resulting debris posing any significant risk dissipates soon after the impact.

"Current research indicates it would be virtually impossible for a person to inhale enough depleted uranium particles for it to be a health risk," a spokesman at NATO's military headquarters in Mons, Belgium said.

However, the ordnance is also blamed by some Gulf War veterans for poor health that they say has affected 100,000 US as well as thousands of British, Canadian and French troops who took part in the 1991 conflict against Iraq.

Those symptoms range from memory loss, chronic fatigue, dizziness, swollen joints and lack of concentration, as well as an apparently high rate of birth defects among children born of veterans.

Former US medical colonel Asaf Durakovic, now a professor of medicine, told a conference in Paris last September that he had found a "significant presence" of depleted uranium in tissue and urine samples among two-thirds of 16 veterans he had tested.

"Some of those particles were inhaled, and if they were too big to be absorbed, they stayed in the lungs, and there they can present a risk of cancer."

Other experts at the Paris seminar were critical, saying Durakovic's data was too incomplete to say whether the uranium was present in large enough quantities to be toxic.

Other specialists say health problems among Gulf veterans are so varied and have been detected among troops who were deployed in such a wide range of areas and roles that there simply cannot be a single cause. The Pentagon, for its part, says it is unable to draw any conclusion.

In the past three years, various studies have fingered other sources, in addition to uranium shells.

They have suggested that multiple vaccinations against Iraqi chemical weapons, administered to troops as they arrived in the Gulf, may have damaged the nervous system. Exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons destroyed after the conflict is another suspect.

Other opinion suggests that there may be no "Gulf War syndrome" at all, and that these health problems are simply better documented than in the past, when soldiers returning from the battlefield were told to be stoical about illness -- or the authorities simply stifled negative news.

Doctors from Britain's Gulf War Illness Research Unit quizzed more than 3,000 British veterans and concluded that medical problems were overwhelmingly due to lifestyle, the return to civilian life after military service and combat stress.

Ill health was far more likely to occur among lower ranks, where smoking, drinking and divorce were more prevalent than among officers, while the discharge from the military often brought with it a decline in physical fitness and traumatic social change.

"Our findings do not support the case for specific environmental exposures in the Gulf," they reported last October.