[G-BRAIN 5635] fwd: [IAC] Did Allied bombs do this?
NOMURA; Osami
このお知らせは"aml","pmn","G-BRAIN"に投稿します。
だぶってごらんになっている方には申し訳ありません。
転載を歓迎しますので、よろしくお願いします。
ＩＡＣメーリングリストより転載します。長くて申し訳ありませんが、イラクの現
状を良く伝えています。
小児ガンにかかる割合の平均値は、１０万人あたり3.9人ですが、激しい爆撃を受け
た場所では、71.8とか41.8などという驚くべき高率になっています。しかも、この
場所では「劣化ウラン」という言葉が良く知られているのです。
NOMURA; Osami
peac...@jca.ax.apc.org
http://www.jca.ax.apc.org/peace-st
Peqace Suitors at Tokyo
＜市民平和訴訟の会・東京＞
At 8:50 AM 98.10.13 -0400, Rania Masri wrote as follows:
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http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B1310818.html
Did Allied bombs do this?
By Robert Fisk in Basra
Independent, 13 October 1998
"OXYGEN, for God's sake get some oxygen - my son is dying." It is an almost
animal wail from the man on the staircase of the Basra paediatric hospital
,
tears running from his eyes, shaking uncontrollably.
In the small room at the top of the stairs, his son Yahyia Salman is
crying, desperate to breathe. A leukaemia relapse - especially in the
sulphurous heat of southern Iraq - is a thing of panic.
"Stop shouting, we have another oxygen bottle," Dr Djenane Khaleb admonishes
the father, pursing her lips with a mixture of irritation and concern.
But the man will not be consoled. "My God, what am I going to do?" he cries
as a technician with a ratchet begins to unscrew the top of a massive
battered black oxygen bottle.
The little boy's eyes move across the room, towards the doctor, towards me
and his father. This is not the moment to tell him that - thanks to readers
of The Independent - his hospital now has all the drugs it needs for
leukaemia. The boxes of vincristine and vials of cefuroxine, ampoules of
metaclopramide, of surgical gloves and syringes arrived less than 24 hours
ago. But Yahyia Salman has gone a long way down the road towards death.
So has two-year-old Youssef Qassem in the next room, and Hala Saleh, who -
just 10 years old - is suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The
doctors show me these children with a kind of infinite weariness, and I can
understand why. They have received so many visitors and so many promises of
help. At least ours was honoured. Dr Khaleb asks, very carefully, if the
Basra hospital received the same amount of drugs as other hospitals in
Baghdad and Mosul. I think I understand the purpose of her question - it was
the Shiites here in the south of Iraq who rose against the Iraqi government
in 1991, and there are those in Baghdad who have never forgiven them.
Dr Khaleb says nothing of this. Yes, I insist, The Independent's medicines
were packed before leaving Heathrow to ensure that every area of Iraq
received - through the charity CARE - an equal share. And she smiles as she
reads the drug manifest, which I have brought with me. "Yes, this is what
we
need," she says. It is the first smile I have seen this trip to Basra. For
the doctors here are overwhelmed as much by the implications of their
discoveries in the cancer clinics as they are by lack of medicine. For the
increase in child cancer in these southern provinces - site of the last
battles of the 1991 Gulf war - is in places reaching ferocious heights.
While in some areas, an average of 3.9 children in every 100,000 are
suffering cancer, the districts of Harthe and Gurne now produce statistics
of 71.8 and 41.8 respectively. There was heavy bombing in these suburbs and
the words "depleted uranium" are heard in every ward; even the parents know
the meaning of the phrase. Allied shells and rockets, they say, contaminated
the fields around Basra - and indeed, in the Basra market, huge tomatoes are
on sale, and outsize mushrooms. No Western scientist has visited to explain
what this means; but the doctors have their suspicions.
Take Dr Jawad Ali at the Basra paediatrics teaching hospital, a member of
the Royal College of Physicians, who produced his own carefully recorded
statistics for The Independent in March. "I don't know how to explain the
implications of this to you but I am seeing terrible things," he said. "One
of our medical students who has just graduated, Zeineddin Kadam, has cancer
and he will die in a few days. The wife of one of our orthopaedic surgeons
died just a week after a diagnosis of acute leukaemia - she died less than
a
month ago when she thought she had an appendix problem. They found part of
her small intestine was gangrenous."
Dr Ali opens a thick file of notes. "Of 15 cancer patients from one area,
I
have only two left. I am receiving children with cancer of the bone - this
is incredible. I have just received a 15-year-old girl, Zeinab Manwar, with
leukaemia - she will live only a year. My God, I have performed mastectomies
on two girls with cancer of the breast - one of them was only 14 - this is
unheard of!"
Dr Akram Hammoud, director of the paediatrics hospital, is no less appalled
.
"Almost all the children here will die in a few months," he said. "We have
one family with three children, all of whom have Hodgkin's lymphoma. What
can have done this? Before the war, we received in this hospital about one
cancer patient a week - now I am getting an average of 40 a week. This is
crazy. We are getting patients with carcinoma cancer below the age of 20 -
one of my patients is 22, another 18. One of the symptoms of leukaemia is
bleeding from the nose - now every child that has a nose-bleed is brought
here by panic-stricken parents."
The Americans - along with their British allies - fired thousands of
depleted uranium shells from tanks and aircraft into the fields around Basra
in the last days of the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation,
projectiles which burn up on impact and scatter radioactive dust around the
target; dust that can be transported by wind or water and inhaled by
breathing. An American military report written in 1990 states that cancers
,
kidney problems and birth defects are among the health effects of uranium
particle contamination.
"Even the common cold in Basra is changing its features," Dr Ali says. "It
takes longer to cure here now and we get advanced cases, sometimes
associated with encephalitis." He reopens his file. "In 1989, we received
116 cancer patients in the whole area; last year, the figure was 270.
Already in the first 10 months of this year, it's 331. No one will give us
the equipment to test the soil. Probably we are all polluted."
His story might be less convincing if it did not sound so similar to those
of the American and British Gulf war veterans whose sudden illnesses - and
deaths - have still not been explained by our governments.
The medicines paid for by Independent readers have now reached the cancer
children of southern Iraq and there were some painful, emotional
handshakes from the doctors when they arrived. But the questions remain,
and one of them is all too ironic: are we helping to cure those whom we
ourselves contaminated?
----------
For more information on the effects of the sanctions war on life in Iraq,
and the effects of depleted uranium, check the section entitled 'impacts
of war' in the IAC website (http://leb.net/IAC/)