By Sherwood Ross
(OpEdNews) - By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.
So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, “The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed.”
“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991,” Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.
Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.
Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, “The long-term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control.”
Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, “For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed.”
She adds, “the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive.”
Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: “Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned-out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground.”
“Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults,” Caldicott wrote. “My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities,” she wrote in her book, “Nuclear Power is not the Answer”(The New Press).
Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars “have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and people---particularly children--- are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially for eternity.”
Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, “the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated,” Caldicott explained.
Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is excreted by the kidney, where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney cancer. It also lodges in the bones where it causes bone cancer and leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the sperm, leading to birth deformities.
Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds, with heaviest concentrations in regions within a 1,000-mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan.
These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan.
“Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes,” Moret asserts.
Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tankers fired radioactive shells during the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO forces also used DU ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU and that members of his clean-up crew have died from it.
As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, “Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time.”
Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey of 251 returned Gulf War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found 67% of children born to them suffered from “severe illnesses and deformities.”
Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or arms, or with hands attached to their shoulders.
While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf War veterans were the first Americans ever to fight on a radioactive battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to display these ghastly deformities.
Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing signs of radiation sickness. Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are dead, published reports indicate.
This is an astonishing toll from such a short conflict in which fewer than 400 U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield.
Of course, “depleted uranium munitions were and remain another causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS),” writes Francis Boyle, a leading American authority on international law in his book “Biowarfare and Terrorism,” from Clarity Press Inc.
“The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon categorized as GWS---even beyond the point where everyone knows that denial is pure propaganda and disinformation,” Boyle writes.
Boyle contends, “The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic, tortious, political, and criminal consequences of admitting the existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as their afterborn children will continue to suffer and die. The same will prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.’s Gulf War II as well as their afterborn children.”
Boyle said the use of DU is outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Convention prohibiting poison gas.
Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his “The Sorrows of Empire”(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence points “toward a significant role for DU.”
By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, “the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.”
Moret calls DU “the Trojan Horse of nuclear war.” She describes it as “the weapon that keeps killing.” Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products.
Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.
But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped.
In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.
Dr. Keith Baverstock, a World Health Organization radiation advisor, informed the media, Iraq’s arid climate would increase exposure from its tiny particles as they are blown about and inhaled by the civilian population for years to come.
The civilian death toll from the August, 1945, U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been put at 140,000 and 80,000, respectively. Over time, however, deaths from radiation sickness are thought to have claimed the lives of another 100,000 Japanese civilians.
(Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based free-lance writer who covers military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com. Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and is a contributor to national magazines.)
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Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Sunday, 18 November 2007
Vitamin consumers interests at stake again at Codex
As the 29th session of the Codex committee on nutrition opens today, a rather surprising attack on our efforts has already been made...
PRESS RELEASE
CODEX MEETING IN GERMANY SET TO DECIDE FUTURE FOR VITAMIN CONSUMERS AROUND THE WORLD
12 November 2007
The US-based National Health Federation (NHF), the world’s longest-standing health-freedom organisation, is today beginning a week of meetings at the 29th session of the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) in Bad Neuenahr, Germany. Expected to be attended by over 300 delegates, observers and advisors, representing about 70 member countries and over 30 international organizations, the Committee, sponsored by the Food & Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization, is the world’s highest international body setting global standards and guidelines on nutrition.
With consumer members all over the world, and a board of governors and advisory board containing representatives from six countries, the NHF is unique as being the only consumer health-freedom organization in the world to enjoy official observer delegate status at Codex. The NHF therefore has the opportunity to make representations on behalf of natural health interests all over the world, which are presently being threatened by over-regulation stimulated by spurious science, misinformed media attacks and corporate pressure from large food and pharmaceutical concerns.
Making up the three-person NHF delegation at this year’s meeting is Scott Tips, NHF’s President and Legal Counsel, Dr Robert Verkerk, scientific advisor to the NHF and also Executive and Scientific Director of the Alliance for Natural Health, and Paul Anthony Taylor, the NHF’s Chairman and also External Relations Director for the Dr Rath Foundation.
“Since Codex sets international principles, guidelines, and standards for all types of foods,” said Scott Tips, “it is essential that the voice of vitamin consumers be heard adequately—and this has been our key focus at Codex ever since we’ve been involved. We are here to make a difference at these meetings and we can already see from our attendance at yesterday's Electronic Working Group meeting on risk assessment that a number of delegations are receptive to our ideas. ”
Addressing some serious scientific concerns, Dr Robert Verkerk added, “In yesterday’s meeting, we have managed to make a strong case that risk-assessment approaches presently being used in Europe—which are being pushed as global guidelines to be adopted through Codex—need to be urgently amended if they are not to prevent millions of people in both the less-developed and developed world from obtaining health-promoting levels of nutrients in foods and food supplements.”
To find out more about Codex, and its potential implications to natural health, listen to the Codex special on the Alliance for Natural Health’s Natural Health Hour on Californian-based internet radio station, www.aimhealthyradio.com, to be broadcast for the first time at 13:00h GMT today.
In an unfortunate development late last night, Dr Rima Laibow of the US-based Natural Solutions Foundation, issued an unprovoked attack on the NHF delegation through her daily email blog. The attack appeared to stem from Dr Laibow’s frustration at not being able to make any comment during Codex meetings owing to the refusal of the Natural Solution Foundation’s application for Codex ‘observer status’ in July 2006 (see further discussion in Editor’s Notes below).
END.
For further information contact:
Dr Robert Verkerk
Scientific Advisor, NHF
Executive & Scientific Director, ANH
Tel: +44 (0)1306 646 600
Email: info@anhcampaign.org
www.anhcampaign.org
Cheri L. Tips
Executive Director, NHF
Tel: +1 626-357-2181
Email: ct@thenhf.com
www.thenhf.com
Editor’s Notes:
1. Codex Committee on Nutrition and Food for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU): one of 27 committees of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, established under the auspices of the Food & Agricultural Organization and World Health Organization.
www.codexalimentarius.net.
2. National Health Federation: established in 1955, the National Health Federation is a consumer-education, health-freedom organization working to protect individuals' rights to choose to consume healthy food, take supplements and use alternative therapies without unnecessary government restrictions. The NHF is the only such organization with recognized observer status at Codex meetings.
www.thenhf.com.
3. Alliance for Natural Health: The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), founded in 2002, is a UK-based, internationally-active not-for-profit campaign organisation working to protect and promote sustainable approaches to healthcare through the use of ‘good science’ and ‘good law.’
www.anhcampaign.org.
4. Natural Solutions Foundation blog, issued 11 November 2007, http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/index.php/?p=442
As is customary with a large body of the outputs from the Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF), this most recent email blog from the NSF’s Medical Director, Dr Rima Laibow, contained numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentation of facts. Such inaccuracies have been reported previously by the Dr Rath Foundation, viz: http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/THE_FOUNDATION/Events/codex-beware.htm.
Dr Laibow’s vehicle, the NSF, was founded in 2004 and applied for Codex ‘observer status’ in March 2006 (see full application on ftp://ftp.fao.org/codex/ccexec58/ex58_04e.pdf, p. 6). The application was refused by the Executive Committee of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in mid-2006 (www.codexalimentarius.net/download/report/661/al2903Ae.pdf, p. 14, item 109), and was confirmed at the 30th session of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in July 2007 (ftp://ftp.fao.org/Codex/CAC/CAC30/if30_02e.pdf).
The main attack in Dr Laibow’s blog against the NHF, which is clearly identified yet unnamed, seems to surround the NHF delegation’s numerous vocal interventions during yesterday’s meeting of the Electronic Working Group on risk assessment. The NHF’s ability to make interventions during Codex meetings is a function of its ‘observer status,’ which it was granted in 2002.
However, it is clear from the NSF’s application for Codex ‘observer status,’ that the NSF was itself planning to make interventions had it been successful in its application. An extract from its application reads as follows:
“The Natural Solutions Foundation anticipates making salient contributions to the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme by submitting commentary and suggestions to this body on issues which touch on
consumer well being, crafted by affiliated attorneys at law and physicians.”
(Source: ftp://ftp.fao.org/codex/ccexec58/ex58_04e.pdf)
Could your attack on the NHF be a case of sour grapes, Dr Laibow?
The NHF’s many interventions during the Electronic Working Group meeting contrasted with Dr Laibow’s enforced silence. Each one of the NHF’s interventions was carefully considered and was made solely in a bid to help protect the future of natural healthcare and benefit vitamin consumers around the world.
Dr Rima Laibow, in her typical fashion, has hit out at the only team in Codex that is actively working in the interests of vitamin consumers, and—once again—Dr Laibow has deeply misunderstood both what the NHF delegation is doing at Codex and what she has the capacity to achieve on the outside, given her unsuccessful application for ‘observer status.’
A more comprehensive discussion of the misstatements, deliberate or otherwise, made by Dr Laibow will be issued shortly on the National Health Federation’s website, www.thenhf.com. In the meantime, the NHF delegation has real work to do protecting your health freedoms through its participation as an INGO in the current session of this Codex committee meeting.
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