U.S. War Crimes: Cancer Rate in Fallujah Worse than Hiroshima

Posted on Jul 23, 2010 in Featured Articles, Police, Military, & War

Source: Global Research

via Cryptogon

The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.

According to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.

Hayden’s Note:

This is the first warning I have ever issued on this website.  I have included some pictures of what depleted uranium does to babies.  These babies are born with mutated parts, monsterous faces and some are barely recognizable as human.  This is so sad and some readers might not want to view them, so I will post them at the END of this article. 

If the babies being born right now are this deformed and cancer rates are exponentially higher than surrounding areas, imagine what the babies of many US soldiers will look like after 3 or 4 tours in Iraq. 

Depleted Uranium is essentially spent nuclear reactor fuel.  Instead of disposing of it in a safe manner, the powers that be have decided that they can not only profit from the waste, but they can get rid of it by creating ammunition with it.  With countless rounds being fired each year in the multiple theater war that’s going on, if you alloy just a small amount of toxic waste to each munition, eventually your soldiers get rid of it for you each time they fire!  It’s also much more deadly as the round becomes much, much denser than typical lead, therefore being used as an armor piercer.  Depleted uranium also reacts to air, so it is literally on fire as it cuts through armor, sending particulates of radiation everywhere upon impact.  Imagine a miniature dirty bomb, because that’s exactly what this is. 

How many rounds have hit homes, schools, hospitals or are simply lying on the ground?  This uranium is constantly giving off radiation and the people of Iraq have to live with it. 

The soldiers get to go back to the “green zone.”

The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah to be many times greater than in nearby nations.

The assault on Fallujah, a city located 43 miles west of Baghdad, was one of the most horrific war crimes of our time. After the population resisted the US-led occupation of Iraq—a war of neo-colonial plunder launched on the basis of lies—Washington determined to make an example of the largely Sunni city. This is called “exemplary” or “collective” punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal.

The new public health study of the city now all but proves what has long been suspected: that a high proportion of the weaponry used in the assault contained depleted uranium, a radioactive substance used in shells to increase their effectiveness.

In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation.

In Fallujah the rate of leukemia is 38 times higher, the childhood cancer rate is 12 times higher, and breast cancer is 10 times more common than in populations in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait. Heightened levels of adult lymphoma and brain tumors were also reported. At 80 deaths out of every 1,000 births, the infant mortality rate in Fallujah is more than five times higher than in Egypt and Jordan, and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Strikingly, after 2005 the proportion of girls born in Fallujah has increased sharply. In normal populations, 1050 boys are born for every 1000 girls. But among those born in Fallujah in the four years after the US assault, the ratio was reduced to 860 boys for every 1000 female births. This alteration is similar to gender ratios found in Hiroshima after the US atomic attack of 1945.

The most likely reason for the change in the sex ratio, according to the researchers, is the impact of a major mutagenic event—likely the use of depleted uranium in US weapons. While boys have one X-chromosome, girls have a redundant X-chromosome and can therefore absorb the loss of one chromosome through genetic damage.

“This is an extraordinary and alarming result,” said Busby, a professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Ulster and director of scientific research for Green Audit, an independent environmental research group. “To produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened. We need urgently to find out what the agent was. Although many suspect uranium, we cannot be certain without further research and independent analysis of samples from the area.”

Busby told an Italian television news station, RAI 24, that the “extraordinary” increase in radiation-related maladies in Fallujah is higher than that found in the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US atomic strikes of 1945. “My guess is that this was caused by depleted uranium,” he said. “They must be connected.”

The US military uses depleted uranium, also known as spent nuclear fuel, in armor-piercing shells and bullets because it is twice as dense as lead. Once these shells hit their target, however, as much as 40 percent of the uranium is released in the form of tiny particles in the area of the explosion. It can remain there for years, easily entering the human bloodstream, where it lodges itself in lymph glands and attacks the DNA produced in the sperm and eggs of affected adults, causing, in turn, serious birth defects in the next generation.

The research is the first systematic scientific substantiation of a body of evidence showing a sharp increase in infant mortality, birth defects, and cancer in Fallujah.

Warning: The following images are of babies deformed and mutated by being born in an area rich in depleted uranium, such as Fallujah.

This is the party of values at work. The party which decries the loss of unborn children and the right to life. The party which claims moral and spiritual superiority. The party which receives massive campaign contributions from companies who manufacture and promotes the use of these types of weapons on the civilian population of countries that had nothing to do with the loss of 3,000 American lives in the [false flag] attacks which occurred on September 11, 2001. This is the NeoCon Republican party.

And to a lesser degree, it also represents both major US political parties, as they are all complicit in possible international war crimes and the corresponding concealment of these deaths and illnesses, as well as those of our own troops. Democrats and Republicans both voted for this damned war and do not have the intestinal fortitude to speak up nor the integrity to do what’s right – end the war and bring our troops home!

 How patriotic.

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