Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[follylama]

The increase in the rate of birth defects in the children of Gulf War veterans and in Iraqis is unexplained. Depleted uranium exposure has been hypothesized to be a source of this.[10],[11]. A 2001 study of 15,000 U.S. Gulf War combat veterans and 15,000 control veterans found that the Gulf War veterans were 1.8 (fathers) to 2.8 (mothers) times more likely to have children with birth defects[12]. However there is evidence to suggest that depleted uranium is not the cause of these birth defects. [13] In a study of U.K. troops, "Overall, the risk of any malformation among pregnancies reported by men was 50% higher in Gulf War Veterans (GWV) compared with Non-GWVs"[14]. A report written by an Irish petrochemical engineer stated that in Iraq, death rates per 1000 Iraqi children under 5 years of age increased from 2.3 in 1989 to 16.6 in 1993 and cases of leukaemia have more than quadrupled in areas where DU was present. I. Al-Sadoon, et al., writing in the Medical Journal of Basrah University, report modest increase many years after the Gulf War. The link between these increases and DU is unproven. (see Table 1 here).

Disputes continue to exist about the role of depleted uranium in Gulf War Syndrome. Some, including Dr. Richard Guthrie, an expert in chemical warfare at Sussex University, have argued that a more likely cause for the increase in birth defects was the Iraqi Army’s use of teratogenic mustard agents. Since more recent epidemiological findings have come to light, only the plaintifs in a long-running class action lawsuit continue to assert that sulphur mustards might be responsible[15]. According to the CDC Toxicological Profile, for sulphur mustards to have produced as many birth defects as have been observed, they would have had to have also produced several dozen times as many cancers as observed[16]. But this is also true for depleted uranium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_Syndrome