Coastal
Post Online
June, 2003
Afghans' Uranium Levels Alarming
By Alex Kirby
BBC News Online environment correspondent
A small sample of Afghan civilians
have shown "astonishing" levels of uranium in their urine, an
independent scientist says. He said they had the same symptoms as some veterans
of the 1991 Gulf war. But he found no
trace of the depleted uranium (DU) some scientists believe is implicated in
Gulf War syndrome.
Other researchers suggest new types
of radioactive weapons may have been used in Afghanistan. The scientist is Dr.
Asaf Durakovic, of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) based in
Washington DC.
Dr. Durakovic, a former US army
colonel who is now a professor of medicine, said in 2000 he had found
"significant" DU levels in two-thirds of the 17 Gulf veterans he had
tested. In May 2002 he sent a team to Afghanistan to interview and examine civilians
there.
The UMRC says: "Independent
monitoring of the weapon types and delivery systems indicate that radioactive,
toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads were being used by the
coalition forces."
Shock results
It says Nangarhar province was a
strategic target zone during the Afghan conflict for the deployment of a new
generation of deep-penetrating "cave-busting" and seismic shock
warheads.
The UMRC says its team identified
several hundred people suffering from illnesses and conditions similar to those
of Gulf veterans, probably because they had inhaled uranium dust.
Bomb damage was widespread
To test its hypothesis that some form
of uranium weapon had been used, the UMRC sent urine specimens from 17 Afghans
for analysis at an independent UK laboratory.
It says: "Without exception,
every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal
contamination.
"The results were astounding:
the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes
between 100 and 400 times greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999.
"If UMRC's Nangarhar findings
are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a
severe public health disaster... Every subsequent generation is at risk."
It says troops who fought in
Afghanistan and the staff of aid agencies based in Afghanistan are also at
risk.
Scientific acceptance
Dr. Durakovic's team used as a
control group three Afghans who showed no signs of contamination. They averaged
9.4 nanograms of uranium per litre of urine.
The average for his 17
"randomly-selected" patients was 315.5 nanograms, he said. Some were
from Jalalabad, and others from Kabul, Tora Bora, and Mazar-e-Sharif. A
12-year-old boy living near Kabul had 2,031 nanograms.
Troops and aid workers could be at risk
The maximum permissible level for
members of the public in the US is 12 nanograms per litre, Dr. Durakovic said.
A second UMRC visit to Afghanistan in
September 2002 found "a potentially much broader area and larger
population of contamination". It collected 25 more urine samples, which
bore out the findings from the earlier group.
Dr. Durakovic said he was
"stunned" by the results he had found, which are to be published
shortly in several scientific journals.
Identical outcome
He told BBC News Online: "In
Afghanistan there were no oil fires, no pesticides, nobody had been
vaccinated-all explanations suggested for the Gulf veterans' condition.
"But people had exactly the same
symptoms. I'm certainly not saying Afghanistan was a vast experiment with new
uranium weapons. But use your common sense."
The UK Defense Ministry says it used
no DU weapons in Afghanistan, nor any others containing uranium in any form.
A spokesman for the US Department of
Defense told BBC News Online the US had not used DU weapons there.
He could not comment on Dr.
Durakovic's findings of elevated uranium levels in Afghan civilians.