Depleted Uranium - The New Agent Orange?

At a time when the ongoing occupation of Iraq is being compared to the Vietnam war, and when the use of depleted uranium munitions by the United States is both increasingly controversial and being dismissed as no threat to health by its advocates, it is maybe an appropriate time to revisit the effects of a 'safe' herbicide known as Agent Orange on a sizeable proportion of the population of Vietnam.

Forty five years ago, President Kennedy gave his assent to plans to utilise herbicides in the Vietnam war - to destroy foliage and in doing so deny cover to the Vietnamese insurgents. The herbicide would also be used to destroy crops that could potentially be used to supply the insurgents. By far the most commonly used herbicide was 2,4,5 –T , nicknamed “Agent Orange” because then barrels in which it was shipped were marked with an Orange stripe.

The Presidential approval for the use of the herbicide ran contrary to Title IV of 1907 Hague Convention which placed strict prohibitions on the use of poisons as weapons or the use of other materials designed to cause unnecessary suffering. It also was in contravention of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which outlawed the use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases. To be fair, the United States did not ratify the Geneva Protocol until 1975, a full fifty years after it was tabled, so it could be said that it was not bound by this protocol in 1961. However, the very fact that it took so long to ratify a protocol that outlawed some of the most barbaric practices of war-making is, in itself, very telling.

Agent Orange contained in 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin as a contaminant. TCDD, one of the most toxic substances known to humankind, was normally present in trace quantities, but sometimes accounted for as much 50 parts per million. The fact that this toxin represented a tiny fraction of the herbicide spray would be little cause for comfort. Laboratory tests on animals exposed to the most minute quantities of dioxin, as low as parts per billion, have suffered notable increases in the rates of birth defects.

Initially, most of the victims were agrarian workers and those in nearby villages who were repeatedly contaminated when they ate contaminated crops or drank tainted ground water. When ingested, dioxins will bioaccumulate, that is they build up and persist in living tissue, compounding their effect. Exposure to Agent Orange or any dioxin has been linked to disorders of the immune, endocrine, cardiovascular, metabolic, gastrointestinal, neurological and respiratory systems, and has been implicated in a number of skin disorders. The risk of terminal cancer amongst men and women exposed to dioxin is increased by 30% and children of parents exposed to Agent Orange are almost two and a half times more likely to be seriously deformed child than those of parents who were not exposed.

The chemicals used during the Vietnam War were produced by Dow, Monsanto, Uniroyal, Thomson Chemicals, Philips-Duphar, Diamond Shamrock, Hercules and others. Tests of the in affected areas found Dioxin concentrations to be 13 times higher than average in the soil and in human fat tissue, where the poison accumulates, up to 20 times as high. By the time the program was abandoned in 1971, thousands of square kilometres had been sprayed with almost 80 million litres of the herbicide. It is estimated that 3,181 villages were subjected to spraying and that as many as 5 million people would have been present during the spraying. In the city of Ben Tre an estimated 58,000 out of 140,000 residents were victims of Agent Orange.

Legal action for compensation by Vietnamese victims of this toxin have been stalled in court, due to the claimed absence of proof that their conditions are linked to the spraying of the herbicide. This is despite ample evidence that dioxins are highly toxic to practically all forms life and can give rise to tumours, systemic failures and genetic abnormalities. In the past, one of the primary sources of evidence to the contrary was Sir Richard Doll, a leading British epidemiologist, who stated that Agent Orange posed no carcinogenic hazard. For his evidence, he was paid consultancy fees of US$1,500 a day by Monsanto for nearly 30 years. These payments call into question the reliability and objectivity of the evidence he provided.

Our media and politicians have no difficulty in believing that the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin based solely on the flimsy evidence that his symptoms resembled those of chloracne - one of the many conditions associated with dioxin poisoning. This despite the fact Yushchenko's own official medical records show conclusively that Yushchenko suffered pancreatitis and hepatomegaly - both of which could easily have given rise to the outward physical symptoms ascribed to dioxin.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, both from the laboratory and from the field, that dioxin in the sorts of concentrations found in Vietnam poses a severe risk to health, the media, government and judicial system is still failing the victims and protecting the purveyors of this poison from costly legal settlements.

While Agent Orange is no longer used, there are a number of substances used in modern warfare that are a serious cause for concern. One of the most commonplace is depleted uranium. It is claimed that the low level of radioactivity of depleted uranium means that DU is unlikely to be a radiological hazard in a conventional sense. However, it is also a heavy metal and as such shares the chemical toxicity properties of other heavy metals - exposure to high doses of any heavy metal can cause adverse health effects.

Despite the assurances that depleted uranium is a low radiological risk, a survey carried out by Dr. Khajak Vartaanian, a nuclear medicine expert from the Iraq Department of Radiation Protection in Basra, and Col. Amal Kassim of the Iraqi navy found that shell holes left by DU munitions in the vehicles along the so-called Highway of Death (the road between Basra and the border with Kuwait) show radiation levels 1,000 times above background. They also found that the desert surrounding the destroyed vehicles was up to 100 times more radioactive than normal background levels. Depleted uranium has been shown to be a problem in other former war zones. Experts from the United Nations have discovered radioactive hot spots in Bosnia - a direct result of the use of depleted uranium during NATO air strikes in 1995.

Ingestion or inhalation of fine uranium oxide dust resulting from the impact of depleted munitions on their targets is the primary potential exposure route and could potentially lead to high levels of radiological exposure. Since the first Gulf War there have has been a surge in birth defects. In 1989 defects number 11 in every 100,000 births whereas in 2001 they had risen to 116 for every 100,000 births. Children were born with a variety of defects - with everything from cleft palettes, leukemia and hydrocephalus. Infants are being born having their internal organs outside their body cavities, being born without brains, without spinal cords, without sexual organs. The list of defects is growing. For those of you who can cope with it, this site shows photos of some of these infants who were deformed at birth, many of whom stand no chance of survival, either because of the severity of their condition or the absence of affordable medication.