BASRA, Iraq—The young man's leg ended abruptly in a bulbous stump. His father, a tall, stately man with weathered eyes that had seen much, stood by the hospital bed and fought back tears as a cancer he could not see slowly killed his son."I got this from the war," said Falah Hussein, 19, wincing in pain. "The explosives gave me this cancer."
In the next bed, Akeel Hassan, 30, was suffering from lymphatic leukemia. He was an Iraqi soldier during the Persian Gulf War at a base in central Iraq. During an air attack, allied missiles pierced the underground bomb shelter, killing 30 soldiers. Hassan was at dinner outside the shelter. He thought himself lucky. Now he is not so sure.
"Ever since then I have been short of breath, dizzy. There was something in the air," he said.
Iraqi health officials contend that "something" was the depleted uranium used for the first time on American and British armaments during the 1990-91 Gulf War. They say there has been a marked increase in cancer from what they say was low-level radioactive and toxic dust that billowed out of the explosions.
The Pentagon insists there is no basis to the Iraqi claim and no health hazard from the uranium-tipped armor-piercing shells used in the war. "We have found no adverse effects" from the armaments, said Bernard Rostker, an assistant Navy secretary who is studying the consequences of the battles.
But the question of whether the American-led "clean war" left a dirty killer in the air and soil of Iraq will not go away, despite the Pentagon's stand.
"Since 1991 the number of cancer cases has increased five to six times over what it was," said Jawad Kudhim Ali, an oncologist at a cancer clinic in Basra, close to the main battlefields of the war. "And we have seen some unusual tumors. There has to be a cause."
The issue also is raised periodically by Western anti-war groups, U.S. congressional reports, some American Gulf War veterans and by some reporters who have observed Iraqi measurements the Iraqis say show increased radiation in and around the wreckage from the war.
Even the U.S. military approaches the issue with some ambivalence. Rostker acknowledged that the Pentagon has issued instructions for soldiers to avoid contact with targets of the uranium shells and is planning training to instruct soldiers not to pick up tank souvenirs.
"There is a lot of contradiction here," Rostker said in a telephone interview from Washington. "We take extraordinary precautions, even though for a casual encounter there is no danger."
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission treats depleted uranium as a hazardous material. And the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses concluded in 1996 that "since uranium is a potential carcinogen, it is possible that exposure to DU [depleted uranium] during the Gulf War could lead to a slight increase in the risk for lung cancer after decades following the war."
The latest study, completed in February by a group called Swords to Plowshares and the National Gulf War Resource Center, concluded that thousands of allied troops may have been exposed to the uranium dust by clambering over damaged Iraqi vehicles after the war. The group's report concluded that the Pentagon "has consistently misled veterans about the extent of depleted uranium exposures during Desert Storm."
More than 630,000 pounds of depleted uranium was released by US tanks and aircraft during the Gulf War, the group said. Depleted uranium is the byproduct of enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel and is one of the densest metals known to man. It was placed on the tips of special armor-piercing shells fired by tanks and aircraft.
It has lower radioactivity than uranium found in nature. But when one of the shells entered a target with a burst of heat, the uranium scattered in a cloud of dust that filtered into the air, covered the ground and eventually entered the ground water, according to critics. Although the radiation is low-level, the dust is a toxic heavy metal, and those critics say prolonged exposure could lead to cancers.
The Swords to Plowshares group asserted that "depleted uranium fragments or particles in the body may cause severe health problems years or decades after exposure," including birth defects and cancers such as leukemia.
Rostker disputed the finding. The report is "not very good," he said, and "misrepresented what is, granted, a very complex subject." He said depleted uranium "is not a highly radioactive substance" and that tests in Kuwait found no increased radiation in the air or soil. Sixteen American soldiers with bits of depleted uranium shrapnel from "friendly fire" are being monitored at the VA hospital in Baltimore, he said.
The Pentagon says it has no way of verifying the accuracy of Iraqi claims of increased cancer nor any way of concluding what might have caused any rise.
On biological grounds, the chance that depleted uranium is causing an excess of cancer in southern Iraq is highly unlikely, for several reasons.
Depleted uranium has only half the radioactivity of purified uranium, a substance that itself has very weak cancer-causing properties even after prolonged contact. In addition, the seven years since the Gulf War is too short a time for radiation-induced cancers to develop, with the exception of leukemia and thyroid cancer. Uranium, however, does not cause thyroid cancer, and the radioactive particles it emits do not penetrate far enough into the body to affect bone marrow cells, which are the source of leukemia.
There is theoretically a cancer risk if a person ingests uranium dust, but the amount required would be huge, said Raymond A. Guilmette, a radiobiologist at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque.
He calculated that a person would have to eat 100 micrograms of depleted uranium -- mixed with dirt, this would amount to about a half teaspoon -- every day for 50 years to get just one one-thousandth of the radiation dose experienced, on average, by nuclear industry workers. A recent study of 100,000 such workers from three countries found a slight increase in leukemia and no increase in other forms of cancer.
Inhalation is the other potentially hazardous route of exposure to depleted uranium dust.
Studies of uranium miners from the 1940s and 1950s, who were exposed to both radon gas and uranium dust, found an increase in lung cancer (especially in smokers) decades after exposure, but no increases in leukemia, lymphoma or other cancers. Recently, a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found no relationship between acute lymphoblastic leukemia -- the most common childhood cancer -- and household levels of radon.
Some heavy metals can cause cancer after long or heavy exposures. They include arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium and nickel. However, the war zone in Iraq is not known to be contaminated with those substances.
The Iraqi Health Ministry has been quiet about the depleted uranium, content to allow Western groups to criticize the weapons.
"We don't have modern equipment to test for this," said Jassim Zboon, director of the Mother of All Battles Research Center. The Pentagon pronouncements on the issue, are "lies, all lies," he said. "It was a new weapon, and cheap," he said. "They used a lot of uranium on us."
Ali, the cancer specialist in Basra, acknowledged there may be other causes and that there is no clear proof of a single cause for the cancers.
But he said there has been a marked increase in leukemia and lymphatic cancer, which he says are often related to radiation. Furthermore, he is finding what he says are rare cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, and an increase in cancers affecting the young.
"We were exposed to eight years of war [with Iran], and we didn't have an increase in cancer. In my 30 years of oncology, I have never seen such high numbers," he said.
Staff writer David Brown contributed to this report.
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