After The War
Comes Cancer
By Jürgen
Hanefeld
10 March, 2005
Dw-world.de
After
two wars where oil wells were torched, chemical factories bombed and
radioactive ammunition fired, the first thing Iraqi women ask when giving
birth is not if it is a boy or a girl, but if it is normal or deformed.
The number of cancer cases and children born with deformities has skyrocketed
after the two Gulf Wars.
"Since 1991
the number of children born with birth deformities has quadrupled,"
said Dr. Janan Hassan, who runs a children's clinic at a hospital in
Basra in southern Iraq. "The same is the case for the number of
children under 15 who are diagnosed with cancer. Mostly, it is leukemia.
Almost 80 percent of the children die because we neither have medicine
nor the possibility to give them chemotherapy."
Doctors have also
recorded an extreme rise in cancer cases among adults. "In 2004
we diagnosed 25 percent more cancer cases than the year before and the
mortality rate increased eight-fold between 1988 and 1991," said
Dr. Jawad al-Ali of the Sadr Hospital in Basra.
Hassan and al-Ali
are two of 15 Iraqi specialists who have joined forces with German scientists
in a project to research diseases provoked by acts of war, financed
by the German Academic Exchange Service.
In Iraq, burning
oil wells, bombed chemical factories, demolished production sites for
chemical weapons and even the use of radioactive ammunition are just
a few of the things which may have triggered diseases there.
"As epidemiologists,
we are quite sure that other diseases than cancer and birth deformities
also have to be considered," said project leader Wolfgang Hoffmann
from the University of Greifswald.
The scientists involved
in the project met through the International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War (IPPNW). All have a special interest in the consequences
of using depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition, the German project's main
focus.
In the two US-led
wars on Iraq, missile warheads containing the depleted uranium-238 were
used. While it is only lightly radioactive, it is an extremely tough
waste-product to contain because the uranium pulverizes and contaminates
the whole surrounding area with radioactivity at the moment of the explosion.
"Naturally,
the nations leading the war refuse to acknowldege that this type of
uranium can be harmful. But as an epidemiologist, I have to say that
every bit of radiation can give rise to cancer. It's just a question
if what was fired in this case led to an increase in the number of cancer
cases," said Professor Eberhard Greiser from the University of
Bremen.
As with many of
the questions arising from the project so far, there is no definite
answer. But al-Ali tried to give a partial answer.
"In Basra in
1991, the Americans and the British dropped at least 300 tons of this
kind of ammunition in one battle. That was the battle where they destroyed
all the tanks of the then Republican Army. After the war, the population
was urged to gather all weapons and sell them to the government. Also
if people had guns or bazookas or whatever they found in the desert,
they were told to bring it with them," he said.
According to al-Ali's
calculations, approximately 750,000 people in Basra and the surrounding
areas were exposed to radiation as a result.
The doctors say
the connection between the contamination of hundred of thousands of
people on one side and the rising number of cancer cases on the other
is beyond doubt, but proving it is not easy.
"To prove it,
we would have to demonstrate that there was uranium 238 on the patients'
clothes or in their body fluid. And besides, cancer is a multi-causal
disease. How would we be able to give 100 percent proof?" al-Ali
asked.
Despite the resigned
attitudes among many of her colleagues, Hassan firmly believes that
the radioactive missiles used by the Americans and the British are responsible
for the increased incidence of cancer in Iraq since the early 1990s.
She hopes a future independent Iraqi government will seek compensation
from Washington and London. "We have to demand it. That is the
price of the war," she said.