Depleted Uranium: Veterans’ Rare Cancers Raise Fears of Toxic Battlefields

Monday, August 6, 2007 by the New York Sun | Veterans’ Rare Cancers Raise Fears of Toxic Battlefields | by R. B. Stuart

WASHINGTON - In the wake of an Iraqi official last month blaming America’s use of depleted uranium munitions in its 2003 “Shock and Awe” campaign for a surge in cancer there, the Defense Department is facing an October deadline for providing a comprehensive report to Congress on the health effects of such weapons.

The report is required by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, which President Bush signed into law last year.
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Even so, worries persist. According to Rep. Jim McDermott, a Democrat of Washington who pushed for the report from the Pentagon, “There are countless stories of mysterious illnesses, higher rates of serious illnesses, and even birth defects. We do not know what role, if any, DU plays in the medical tragedies in Iraq, but we must find out.”

Modern wars have produced a number of specific medical complaints, ranging from “Gulf War Syndrome” - a group of immune disorders and cancers whose connection to service in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict is being studied - to the long-term effects of a defoliant, Agent Orange, for which some Vietnam veterans obtained a settlement in 1984.

While their causes can’t be pinpointed definitively, some soldiers who have avoided being killed or wounded in the current Iraq conflict are returning to America to find they have debilitating illnesses or cancers that they suspect are related to battlefield conditions, whether it is the depleted uranium used in projectiles, the remains of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons, or the smoke from burning oil wells. ...
...was diagnosed with a rare condition only seen in teenage girls: Stage IV dysgerminoma, an ovarian germ cell cancer. ...
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At the end of the month, Lauderdale saw a dentist in Kuwait City, who lifted his tongue and found a lesion. Biopsy results came back as Stage II squamous cell cancer of the mouth floor and tongue.
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... While he was on assignment in Iraq in October 2005, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and evacuated to Walter Reed, where an 8.5-by-4.5-inch nonmalignant meningioma was removed.
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Sergeant Valentin was diagnosed with hemorrhoids eight times and sent back to work, but when the pain and discomfort did not abate, he instinctively knew something was wrong, he said. Finally, a reservist who was an oncologist diagnosed Sergeant Valentin with colon cancer.

The reservist oncologist told him that there were six other soldiers with newly found cancers in his unit, Sergeant Valentin said.
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