Grafenwoehr, Germany - No one in this town of 7 000 people next door to the US Army's largest training area in Europe knows whom to believe anymore. Even Mayor Helmuth Wachter is unsure.

Wachter says he only learned less than three weeks ago - from the media - that depleted-uranium ammunition was ever in the Grafenwoehr training area, and that one round was fired there in 1987, while he was mayor.

Wachter's feeling of powerlessness is shared by many Europeans confronted with increasingly shrill reports on two unrelated but major issues of public safety: depleted uranium munitions and mad cow disease.

Depleted uranium is a slightly radioactive heavy metal used in armour-piercing munitions. Although no sickness in Grafenwoehr - or anywhere else - has been traced back to it, the public suspects that it isn't getting the whole story.

Too often, Europeans have seen their leaders issue assurances, only to backtrack later. Now, facing dual public health scares, they are looking to their leaders for assurances they can't seem to provide, said Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.

"Safety has emerged as the defining means of a political system," Furedi said. "The idea of safety has acquired a moral quality."

After Italian peacekeepers serving in the Balkans claimed that exposure to the munitions may have caused serious illnesses, people began demanding more information from politicians.

The overall scepticism results from media coverage and the secretiveness of European governments, said Howard Fienberg, an analyst with the Statistical Assessment Service, a Washington DC-based non-partisan group that studies scientific and statistical data.

He cites coverage of mad cow disease as a large factor in fomenting German public outcry, even though the disease has been found in two dozen German cows - a fraction of the tens of thousands found infected in Britain.

"It was not that the public was presented with evidence that there was an epidemic of mad cow-related disease in humans. The public outcry was manufactured in news headlines and tabloid journalism," Fienberg said.

Gero von Randow, a journalist with Germany's leading weekly Die Zeit, blames the politicians.

"There have been many crises where politicians rule out every possibility of it being dangerous and then the media take a hold of it and they are forced to back-pedal," he said.

In Remscheid, northwest Germany, a town council group is looking back 12 years to the crash of an American Thunderbolt A-10 warplane. Remembering that official reports said it posed no health threat, the town is demanding the government look again.

"It can be that we are all on the wrong path - but people's worries are only increasing," said Thomas von Aachen, a group spokesman.

The handling of mad cow disease has caused widespread alarm. At first, despite warnings from European Union officials, officials stubbornly denied it had spread to German-born cattle. Now that it has, two German government ministers have had to resign.

Not to be wrongfooted on depleted uranium as well, Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires to demand details of the use of the ammunition in Germany.

After receiving a report from U.S. military officials in Germany, Scharping suggested in parliament that the previous government of Helmut Kohl was to blame for telling the public of incidents it knew about.

The military report listed four known cases involving depleted uranium across Germany, including at Grafenwoehr, where a soldier defied orders and fired a depleted-uranium round instead of a practice round in 1987. It cited another five suspected incidents between 1981 and 1990.

The 35-hectare base employs 1 500 people from the Grafenwoehr area, so the town is reluctant to alienate its American neighbours.

Hilda M., who wouldn't allow her full name published, works in a bakery near the base and says she is scared. "You don't really know what goes on there," she said.

Depleted uranium rounds were loaded on tanks during the Cold War but have never been used in training, said Jim Boyle, spokesman for the US Army in Europe. They have been stored in Germany since 1990 at an undisclosed place for use in missions abroad.

Capt. Jeff Settle, public affairs officer at Grafenwoehr, said the 1987 incident never became an issue since no one was injured and tests found no radiation in the dirt where the live round landed. He said the Army follows strict German environmental standards and lists accident control procedures on its website.

"We are not trying to hide anything on this," Settle said. "We need to live and work here, too."

In 1999, the area Greens party asked the Bavarian state government whether depleted-uranium munitions were being used at Grafenwoehr.

The reply quoted US military officials as saying: "The US military neither carries nor fires munitions with depleted uranium in Grafenwoehr or in other training areas."

Still, Mayor Wachter wants a thorough investigation into radiation levels and cancer rates in the Grafenwoehr area.

"It has made the community uneasy," said Wachter. "We want to know."