[G-BRAIN 5638] Fw: [IAC] WHO to investigate radiation fall-out from Gulf war in Iraq
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メーリングリストからの転載です。
国連世界保健機構（ＷＨＯ）が近いうちに、湾岸戦争で使用した劣化ウラン弾に
よるイラク市民への影響調査を始めるようです。既に、３人の調査団員がイラク
の病院（Iraq's H ospital for Nuclear Medicine in Baghdad）を訪問し、ガンの
増加の記録と連合軍（日本では「多国籍軍」と誤解を招く翻訳語で報道）の使っ
た兵器との関連を、数週間の内に報告するそうです。
イラクの劣化ウラン被害は、かなり前から示されていたにもかかわらず、湾岸戦
争から７年もたって、やっと国連でも取り上げざるを得なくなったということで
す。それだけ、深刻な被害が生じていることを認めざるを得なくなったというわ
けです。
これとは別に、イラクの女医さんが、１９７６年以来、ガンの記録をしていまし
た。実に貴重なデータです。詳しくは、下記のＵＲＬをアクセスして下さい。そ
の記録によると、湾岸戦争以来、ガンの発生パターンが変っているということで
す。例えば、複合ガンが出てきたり、若い女性の乳ガンが増えているということ
です。おそろしい話です。
http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B1410809.html
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＞
Forwarded by NOMURA; Osami <peac...@jca.ax.apc.org>
---------------- Original message follows ----------------
From: Rania Masri <rrm...@unity.ncsu.edu>
To: iac-...@leb.net
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 22:33:09 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [IAC] WHO to investigate radiation fall-out from Gulf war in Iraq
--
=========Iraq Action Coalition ========http://leb.net/IAC/ =======
To subscribe, send an e-mail to "majo...@leb.net" with
'subscribe iac-list' in the body of the message
==================================================================
===================== "Dr Mona el-Hassan has been drawing up cancer
statistics in Iraq since 1976 and her files are both professional and
convincing. "There has been a changing pattern of cancers since the war,
including a double incidence of cancer of the intestinal tract," she says.
"There has been an increase in the incidence of breast cancer among young
females. Nowhere else in the world has there been a high incidence below
the age of 30."==============================
http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B1410809.html
WHO to investigate radiation fall-out from Gulf war in Iraq
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
The World Health Organisation may soon begin a study into the effects on
Iraqi civilians of depleted uranium shells in the 1991 Gulf War - and
enrage the Western nations that used them during and after the liberation
of Kuwait.
The shells are widely blamed for a frightening increase in cancer -
especially among Iraqi children - and may have contaminated large areas of
southern Iraq. Independent readers responded to reports from the region by
sending 」100,000 to an appeal for medicines, which have just been delivered.
The government in Baghdad believes that a WHO report would finally confirm
their suspicions that the Allies saturated the land with radiation.
A three-man WHO team has already visited Iraq's Hospital for Nuclear
Medicine in Baghdad to inspect its records of cancer increases since the
war, and is due to report in the next few weeks on how an investigation can
be conducted into the use of the Allied ordnance.
If the Iraqi Ministry of Health approves, WHO personnel would spend two
years taking evidence on the use of the shells and the effect on the health
of millions of Iraqis whose families lived near the sites of the battles and
bombardments.
For Saddam Hussein, of course, this would provide further propaganda in his
campaign to lift the punitive UN sanctions against Iraq - always supposing
sanctions are still in place in two years - and to accuse the Americans and
British of "war crimes".
Hitherto, it is Saddam himself who has been accused of crimes against
humanity. Nevertheless, if a WHO team concludes that the shells and missiles
that use armour- piercing depleted uranium penetrators - and cause
radioactive and chemically toxic dust to be scattered around the target -
are to blame for the Iraqi cancer epidemic, there will be substantial
pressure on the Gulf War victors to pay compensation to Iraq and to ban
future use of the controversial weapons.
Ironically, the two-storey Iraqi Hospital for Nuclear Medicine stands next
door to the Baghdad WHO headquarters whose director, Dr Habib Rejab, has
confirmed to The Independent that WHO representatives have made a
preliminary study of Iraqi cancer data. Last week, the hospital's senior
medical staff also allowed me to inspect their statistics on post-war cancer
cases - figures that suggest a correlation between leukaemia increases and
the war. Of course, the very name of Saddam Hussein tends to contaminate
Iraqi-compiled government statistics as surely as the Allied armies may have
contaminated the land of Iraq. But the hospital's graphs appear to be
accurate - they start long before the 1991 war and, in some cases, clearly
show a fall in cancer when one might have expected an increase. If
propaganda experts have been at work, they did a poor job.
Dr Mona el-Hassan has been drawing up cancer statistics in Iraq since 1976
and her files are both professional and convincing. "There has been a
changing pattern of cancers since the war, including a double incidence of
cancer of the intestinal tract," she says. "There has been an increase in
the incidence of breast cancer among young females. Nowhere else in the
world has there been a high incidence below the age of 30."
Her latest statistics - still to be published - show a startling increase in
leukaemias in Iraq's southern provinces, the area most affected by the 1991
war. Some areas, such as Wasit, show an actual decrease - from 226 cases in
1989 to 203 in 1994 and then 224 in 1996 - but other figures bear out
doctors' suspicions. The childhood cancer registry, for example, shows an
increase in boys with lymphatic leukaemia aged up to 4 and between 5 and 9,
>from 68 and 94 in the 1989-1991 period to 86 and 98 between 1992 and 1994.
During the same periods, myeloid leukaemia has increased from 2 cases to 12
(in the 0 to 4 age group) and from 5 to 18 in the group aged 5 to 9 years.
Total myeloid leukaemia figures for children aged up to 15 go from 26 in the
earlier table to 61 in the most recent. In similar age patterns, the
increase in lymphatic leukaemia among girls is equally disturbing: 118 cases
in the 1989-91 period compared with 174 between 1992 and 1994. The
statistics show an overall increase among both boys and girls during the
same periods for cancer of the eye and thyroid and Hodgkin's disease.
Interestingly - and perhaps another reason to trust them - the statistics
show a decrease in bone cancer among girls and cancer of the kidney. Iraqi
propagandists would not have made the mistake of leaving those figures
intact.
Annual figures for overall cancer patients give a clear idea of the
increases. In 1990, 7,058 new cancer cases were registered in Iraq. By 1992,
the figure has soared to 8,526. The comparable breakdown figure for males is
3,913 in 1990 and 4,735 in 1992, for females 3,145 in 1990 and 3,791 in
1992. The total of new cancer figures for 1996, still unpublished, shows an
increase of well over a thousand since 1990 - from 7,058 to 8,360 - although
a slight fall on the comparable figure for 1992.
Iraqi officials acknowledge that 1991 figures - which show an unbelievable
decrease - are of little use because they did not include cancer cases from
the Kurdish Mosul province, which was then in a state of insurrection
against the regime.
Iraqi doctors say there are many cancer cases that are never reported to
the government. "In a small village, they will say a child is 'sick' and
they will think it has some passing illness and then it dies and is buried
and we never hear about it," one doctor told me. "Other families believe it
wrong to admit they have cancer cases - in case it affects the marriage
prospects of their other children. So we may have far more cases than we
realise."
=====
For more information on the impacts of the military and sanctions war on the
people of Iraq, refer to the section entitled 'impact of war' in the Iraq
Action Coalition website (http://leb.net/IAC/)
For information on the effects of depleted uranium, refer to the section
under environment, in the impact of war page, or go directly to
(http://leb.net/IAC/environment.html)