Section 45 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 June 10 Tuesday.
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I said I'd hold fire on the blog for a bit, unless something major happened, like a big earthquake striking Japan. In fact, a big earthquake did hit - but it was in the north. Hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter, I still noticed it, and so did the lilies someone had parked in the living room, which swayed from side to side in sympathy. But that was all. So I decided not to comment. In fact, I was thinking of not blogging again until the start of 2004. And then something disturbing happened.

Back in 2002 I put together a webpage about depleted uranium. At that time, the anti-DU case seemed very reasonable to me. In a nutshell, the case can be stated like this: depleted uranium is radioactive, and it's also a poisonous chemical, and yet the American military throws it around the landscape with great abandon, causing health catastrophes to American military personnel and innocent civilians alike.

Then, out of the blue, I got an e-mail calling me on this. And, when put in the position of having to validate the DU page, I realized I didn't really know much about the subject, and my DU page started looking distressingly like a mindless piece of me-tooism.

So I started digging into the available database, seeking to validate the page, but the more I learnt the less I knew.

Nothing is as productive of certainty as ignorance, and the more facts I accumulated the more ambiguous the situation came to seem.

Many webpages exist arguing the two sides of the DU case, these two sides being that "DU is demonically dangerous" or that "Although DU does bite, it's not really such a bad dog."

However, whichever way you care to argue, it's necessary to make a bunch of assumptions, because a lot of the basic research has not been done yet. (The more technical a webpage happens to be, the more likely it is to admit this.)

After delving around in the database, I soon felt competent to construct either the "demonic demon" case or the "good dog" case. And, equally, felt perfectly capable of shooting holes in either case.

The more official the webpage, the more reassuring it tends to be. While acknowledging that DU is, chemically, far too toxic to be considered safe, and while acknowledging, also, that it is radioactive, these sites nevertheless crunch statistics (or, if you prefer, massage statistics) to produce a "few if any" casualties result.

However, this official "no problem" analysis fails to explain statistics which suggest health catastrophe amongst both Iraqi civilians and Desert Storm veterans.

The world would probably be a better place if more people lay awake at nights worrying about one basic web question: is everything on my Internet site true and accurate? And last night that's exactly what I did.

Depleted uranium stands accused of having caused a catastrophic increase in cancer and birth deformities in the southern part of Iraq, and it has also been accused of being the bad guy in the Gulf War Syndrome situation, which has seen tens of thousands of soldiers who served in the Persian Gulf War (1990-91) fall ill.

But is it guilty as charged?

Last night I lay awake considering the range of possible choices:-

(A) yes, guilty, because the radiation hazard is greater than is commonly believed, or (B) yes, guilty, because the chemical toxicity is greater than is commonly assumed, or (C) no, innocent, in which case it is true that either (i) the victims are imaginary or (ii) yes, there are a lot of maimed bodies littering the landscape, but some other dude did it.

So what's the answer? (A) or (B) or (C)?

This morning I discovered that there's a theory that the answer may in fact be (D).

The article announcing the possible answer comes from

The Guardian

newspaper (Britain), and it is on the site www.guardian.co. uk at:-

/life/feature/story/0,13026,937902,00.html

On reading the article, theory (D) emerges: there may be an unholy synergy between DU's radiation hazard and the chemical toxicity of the same metal. The article does not use the word "synergy," but is seems appropriate to sum up what is being described.

The article includes the following:-

Alexandra Miller at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, is due to complete an investigation into DU for the US department of defence next year. Already she has some insight into the damage it can do. Last year she showed that depleted uranium from pellets implanted in rats dispersed all over the animals' bodies, turning up in bones, muscles, kidneys and liver. Rats breeding six months later had fewer offspring than normal.

Her latest study reveals something even more unusual. When human bone cells are exposed to DU, some suffer immediate genetic damage. The type of damage varies but often fragments break off chromosomes, the strings of genes in almost every cell, and form tiny rings of genetic material. This much was expected. But as other cells evidently undamaged by the depleted uranium started to divide, creating new cells, Miller noticed the genes in some of these new cells were damaged. More than a month after the DU was removed, new cells were forming with broken chromosomes or other genetic damage. The DU was having a delayed effect.

More intriguing still is Miller's latest suspicion that DU punches above its weight in terms of the damage it does to genes. She knew that depleted uranium could damage genes not only by emitting radiation, but by its chemical make up - like nickel, it can switch on cancer genes by its sheer toxicity. But she found that tiny amounts of DU, too small to be toxic and only mildly radioactive, cause more genetic damage in cells than either the toxicity or radiation could explain. Her latest results suggest that the toxicity and radioactivity of DU reinforce one another, causing more damage than the two just added together. It's no small difference either. "You can get more than an eight-fold greater effect than you'd expect," she says. In other words, more than eight times as many cells suffer genetic damage than predicted. Without taking the effect into account, the health risk of DU could be grossly underestimated.

The above, then, gives us answer (D), answer (D) being that there is an eightfold synergy between the radioactivity of DU and the toxicity of DU.

Answer (D) is logically attractive because it satisfies the truth test requirements of Occam's Razor, the ancient law that the simplest explanation is the most probable.

Let's look at the alternatives from the point of view of simplicity:-

Option (A) is that the radiation hazard of DU is greater than is commonly believed. Now, it may be that this is in fact the case - it may be that the risk has been understated. Even so, there is a huge gap between the officially acknowledged consequences of the DU radiation hazard and the health catastrophe which Iraqi civilians and US veterans are alleged to have suffered, and closing that gap would take quite some doing.

Option (B) is that the chemical toxicity of DU has been understated, and it suffers from the same problem as Option (A). Uranium has been around for a long time and there is a lot of documentation on it. It this industrial metal were massively more toxic than is commonly believed, then the proof of its unsuspected venomousness would have turned up at the morgue.

Option (C) involves believing that (i) there is no health catastrophe, in which case various Iraqi health professionals have been lying, and many thousands of American war veterans have either been malingering or else, alternatively, have been hysterically misinterpreting the symptoms of other diseases, one obvious candidate being depression; or, (ii) that there is another agent in play, Mystery Agent X, a possible candidate being the nerve gas sarin, a theory which (to meet the statistical needs of the situation) requires vast tracts of land to be contaminated with sarin in the 1990-91 war without the said sarin actually killing anyone outright at the time.

I have to say that, from an intellectual point of view, option (D) - synergetic evil - looks uncommonly satisfying.

So I don't plan on taking down my DU page just yet, although I do plan to keep on digging through the database to find out what else I can discover.

The science is obviously incomplete, and this really came home to me when I looked at some material dealing with radon - which, like depleted uranium, is a source of radiation in the form of alpha particles, an alpha particle being (in effect) the nucleus of a helium atom, a bulky particle which is poor at penetrating shielding (human skin, for example) but can do destruction at the DNA level if it does manage to score a hit.

In America there's an outfit called the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and they have a page dealing with radon risks at:-

www.epa.gov/iaq/radon/riskcht.html

This led me to a 1999 publication, the National Research Council's report "Health Effects of Exposure to Radon."

The Executive Summary of the 1999 report is on the EPA site at:-

www.epa.gov/iaq/radon/beirvi1.html

The Executive Summary includes the following statement:-

For estimating the risk of indoor radon, the committee chose an empirical approach based on analysis of data from radon-exposed miners. Other approaches that the committee considered but did not use included a "dosimetric" approach, and use of "biologically-motivated" risk models. A dosimetric approach, in which radon risks are estimated by applying risk estimates from A-bomb survivor studies to estimates of radiation doses delivered to the lung, was not pursued because of the major differences in the type of radiation and exposure patterns compared with radon-progeny exposure. A biological-based approach to modeling with a description of the various processes leading to radon-induced cancer was not followed primarily because of the present incomplete state of knowledge of many of these processes.

This highlights two problems involved in discussions of radiation:-

(i) not all radiation is equal, and getting zapped by X-rays (or by the blast of the Nagasaki bomb) is not the same as being exposed to alpha particles.

(ii) the medical science is incomplete.

Consequently, considering the theory to be inadequate, the researchers looked at what happens in practice:-

The committee turned to the empirical analysis of epidemiologic data as the basis for developing its risk model. Two sources of information were available: data from the epidemiologic studies of underground miners and data from the case-control studies of indoor radon and lung cancer in the general population.

In other words, instead of arguing from the math to the health result, the committee looked at the health result and then, from that, figured out what the math must be. This is an interesting approach since a certain number of pro-DU pages seem to take the attitude that, "Well, according to the math it's not dangerous, so it can't be."

I'm still at this stage wandering in the world of unknowns, but one page that I found strongly suggested, at least to me, that perhaps it's best not to be too reassured.

I was looking for accounts of exactly what happens to DU when it is used on the battlefield, and I accidentally stumbled upon a page dealing with tank accidents.

www.gulflink.osd.mil/du/du_tabj.htm

In 1991, for example, there was an accidental tank fire when some rounds on board a tank exploded while it was being towed by another tank. In the aftermath:-

A three-man AMCCOM radiation containment (RAD CON) team flew by helicopter from King Khalid Military City (KKMC), where they were working with DU-contaminated systems, to the site of the tank fire to assess the damage and provide technical assistance. Upon arrival, they observed the tank crew removing all ammunition from the burned A-31. DU and high explosive (HE) rounds were lying on the ground around the tank. Crewmembers were working on the tank, in the ammunition compartment, and on the ground surrounding the tank. Initial readings indicated possible contamination of the tank and surrounding area. More extensive readings confirmed DU contamination on the ground beside the tank, on the front surface of the tank, on the top of the ammunition compartment, and in the ammunition compartment. The RADCON team asked all crewmembers to vacate the tank so they could be radiologically examined. The hands of several crewmembers were contaminated, and one crewmember's coveralls were also contaminated. All individuals were shown how to decontaminate their skin and clothing. All exposed skin was checked for cuts and lacerations. Individuals with open wounds were directed to wash thoroughly. These wounds were also cleaned with Betadine and bandaged. One individual had radiological contamination in an open wound. The wound was thoroughly scrubbed until all traces of contamination were removed.

Obviously, way back in 1991, those who were in a position to know how dangerous this stuff was were taking it tolerably seriously.

At this stage, as far as the true dangers of DU are concerned, color me unclear. And yet, having said that, it seems fairly obvious that there is, at the very least, a case for cleaning up the chemically toxic radioactive garbage which the USA has spread about the landscape in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The article which succeeded in convincing me of this is an Iraq-related article by Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel published, apparently, in "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" November/December 1999, Vol. 55, No. 6, pp. 42-45. The article has the title "After the Dust Settles".

After the Dust Settles

In summary:-

(1) The article is sceptical about the possibility of any significant damage caused by external exposure to DU. The argument (which seems reasonable) is that if DU is outside the body then it is unlikely to be much of a problem.

(ii) Having indicated that the radiation burden from external battlefield DU is insignificant, the article then says that "Internal body doses could by higher". If 20 percent of a depleted uranium projectile burns, "a reasonable estimate based on army tests," then "a heavy DU penetrator might generate a kilogram of uranium oxide aerosol."

(iii) The article says that "For a heavy penetrator, the released energy would be equivalent to the explosion of as much as a kilogram of TNT, lifting the aerosol upward on a column of hot air. Because of this vertical dilution, the amount of depleted uranium inhaled by a nearby person would probably not exceed 0.1 milligrams. The dose to a person a mile away directly downwind would be about ten times less."

(iv) The article cites a model indicating that "15 percent of an insoluble inhaled uranium oxide aerosol could be retained in the lungs for more than a year."

(v) The article says that "For someone close to the battle who inhaled one milligram of depleted uranium - an unlikely scenario because he would have to be exposed to several close hits - the equivalent whole-body dose would be up to 0.1 rem. That is roughly half the annual average dose from inhaled radon and its decay products in a typical single-family home in the United States. An individual's estimated added risk of dying from cancer from such a dose would be about one in 20,000. (To put that figure in perspective, we in the United States have a one-in-five risk of dying of cancer.)"

(vi) The article does some math and figures that depleted uranium used in Desert Storm could have resulted in ten "excess lung cancer deaths in the lifetimes of the exposed populations".

(vii) Apart from the radiation hazard, there is a chemical hazard, in that uranium is chemically toxic. The article says that "The greatest hazard from depleted uranium's chemical effects would come from its soluble oxides. Army tests indicate that 17 to 43 percent of the uranium oxides produced initially as a result of hard impacts of DU penetrators are relatively soluble. For very small aerosol particles, about half of the inhaled soluble oxides would dissolve into the blood after being inhaled and five percent after being ingested."

(viii) Regarding the chemical toxicity, the article says that "The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health and Administration sets a limit on the eight-hour average exposure for unprotected workers to soluble forms of uranium at 0.05 milligrams per cubic meter, the same as for lead."

(ix) The article says that "The International Commission on Radiological Protection model assumes that about one-eighth of the uranium that finds its way into the bloodstream will deposit in the kidneys. The rest will either be rapidly eliminated in the urine or attach itself temporarily to bone surfaces. For one milligram of uranium to be deposited in the kidneys, the blood would have to absorb about eight milligrams of soluble uranium compounds. If the fraction of soluble uranium oxides were one-third of the total uranium oxides released in the DU attack, then about 50 milligrams would have to be inhaled."

(x) The article suggests that some soldiers who were in vehicles hit by DU rounds (and their rescuers, and any unprotected cleanup workers who spent "prolonged periods" in the vehicles) "may have inhaled enough DU dust to suffer heavy-metal effects". Because of the residual toxic risk (and the risk of unexploded munitions) such wrecked vehicles "should be made inaccessible, perhaps by being buried and then pumped full of concrete."

The article's statements sound very measured, even and reasonable in the light of what is known about DU. The case made, essentially, is that someone should deal with the garbage. And yet, at the same time, the question remains: if casualties exist in defiance of the math, does that mean that the casualties are imaginary or that the math is flawed?

And if there is, in fact, a demonic eightfold synergy between the chemical toxicity of depleted uranium and its radioactivity, then that would force all the math to be recomputed.

For the time being, as I continue to do my best to dig through the database, I'm leaving my

dangers of depleted uranium

page up and running.

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Section 45 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 June 11 Wednesday
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Today I continued my research into the synergies of evil.

Yesterday I found the 2003 April 17

Alexandra Miller DU story

on a site run by The Guardian (Britain). The article suggests that new research indicates a possible synergy between the radioactivity of depleted uranium and its toxicity, leading (possibly) to an eightfold increase in the damage potential of DU. (Point: the article does not use the word "synergy," but the word seems applicable.)

Today I tried to follow up this story by punching "Alexandra Miller" into Google's search box, but I didn't have much luck. Then I went to:-

The New Scientist

Punching "Alexandra Miller" into the search box on the actual webpage itself led me to an article dated 14 April 2003, summarized as "To overcome Iraqi forces, coalition troops fired thousands of shells tipped with DU - but its long-term health effects are still not fully understood".

The article is here:-

Depleted uranium casts shadow over peace in Iraq

This answered one of the questions I had: is Alexandra Miller the only person thinking that maybe DU's radioactivity and chemical toxicity are team players?

Answer: no.

DU is both radioactive and toxic. Past studies of DU in the environment have concluded that neither of these effects poses a significant risk. But some researchers are beginning to suspect that in combination, the two effects could do significant harm. Nobody has taken a hard look at the combined effect of both, says Alexandra Miller, a radiobiologist with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. "The bottom line is it might contribute to the risk."

She is not alone. The idea that chemical and radiological damage are reinforcing each other is very plausible and gaining momentum, says Carmel Mothersill, head of the Radiation and Environmental Science Centre at the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. "The regulators don't know how to handle it. So they sweep it under the carpet."

Apparently some of Miller's research has been published in print. At a couple of points the article in The New Scientist gives citations. One is Military Medicient, vol 167, p120, and the other is Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, which is described as being "in press".

The New Scientist uses the "synergy" label to describe what is suspected when it writes:-

Britain's Royal Society briefly referred to these synergistic effects in its report last year on the health effects of DU munitions. "There is a possibility of damage to DNA due to the chemical effects being enhanced by the effects of the alpha-particle irradiation." But it makes no recommendations for future research to evaluate the risks.

The article in The New Scientist is very readable but a little more detailed than the article in The Guardian.

One of the big questions about radioactivity is whether we can argue from the math to the health result, or whether we have to look at the health result and, from that, figure out what the math must be.

In the article in The New Scientist there's another hint that the math may be wrong.

When I read what the article says about "the bystander effect," the image that leapt into my mind was tenpin bowling. When you roll a ball at a bunch of pins, you may hit one but knock down two or three. The damage you do to the stability of the one has negative implications for its neighbors.

About "the bystander effect" the article says this:-

Miller points to another reason to be concerned about DU: the so-called "bystander effect". There is a growing consensus among scientists that radiation damages more than just the cells it directly hits. In tests using equipment that allows single cells to be irradiated by individual alpha particles, gene expression increases both in irradiated cells, and in neighbouring cells that have not been exposed. "At high doses, 'bystander' is not an issue because you are killing so many cells. But at low doses that's not really true," says Miller. There is a danger that experiments not specifically looking for this effect could miss an important source of damage.

A body of research has also emerged over the past decade showing that the effects of radiation may not appear immediately. Damage to genes may be amplified as cells divide, so the full consequences may only appear many generations after the event that caused it.

Now, on top of that, considered as a toxic chemical, uranium is genotoxic, meaning that it "chemically alters DNA, switching on genes that would otherwise not be expressed".

Other heavy metals, such as tungsten, nickel and cobalt are similarly genotoxic. When Miller and her team exposed human cells to a mixture of these metals, significantly more genes became activated than when the cells were exposed to the equivalent amount of each metal separately (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, in press).

The article in The New Scientist is linked to an

editorial

which includes this message:-

"Evidence of the absence of any health impacts would be reassuring but all we have at present is an absence of evidence."

The theme of the editorial seems to be that, in the current state of scientific uncertainty, reassuring noises made about depleted uranium are just that - reassuring noises.

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A scientific study is underway called:-

Carcinogenic Potential of Depleted Uranium and Tungsten Alloys

Today's new piece of jargon is HMTA, meaning heavy metal tungsten alloy.

Exposure of cultured human bone cells to DU or HMTA resulted in a transformation of those cells to a type with biochemical and growth characteristics typical of tumor cells. The magnitude of transformation observed with DU and HMTA was similar to that observed with the known heavy metal carcinogen, nickel. These cells, once transformed, produced tumors when injected into immune deficient mice. DU and HMTA were also shown to be genotoxic and mutagenic in model system studies.

The estimated completion date for the study above is 2003 December 31.

If you happen to be interested in real science, real science done by real scientists who spend their working days doing horrible things to rats, then this page seems to be a good place to start, since it has a bunch of links to pages with sexy titles like "Neoplastic transformation of human osteoblast cells to the tumorigenic phenotype by heavy metal-tungsten alloy particles: induction of genotoxic effects".

(It's at moments like this that one really appreciates the virtues of cut-and-paste.)

If you are unable to resist the temptation and click through to the abstract in question, you learn that

Heavy metal-tungsten alloys (HMTAs) are dense heavy metal composite materials used primarily in military applications. HMTAs are composed of a mixture of tungsten (91-93%), nickel (3-5%) and either cobalt (2-4%) or iron (2-4%) particles. Like the heavy metal depleted uranium (DU), the use of HMTAs in military munitions could result in their internalization in humans. Limited data exist, however, regarding the long-term health effects of internalized HMTAs in humans.

And I think this is as far as I can go today. I've been up since 0400 and it's now coming up to 0600, and time for breakfast, and work.

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Section 45 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 June 14 Saturday.
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I've been working quite energetically on the website, and I have a bunch of new stuff up, including some flash fiction, a new (long) story and a revised piece on depleted uranium.

I've added a number of pieces to the flash fiction collection in the last few days, and today I posted a longer story called UPGRADE.

Also today I put up a revised version of my page on depleted uranium. One piece of speculation that I didn't add to the DU page was this: with so much DU lying around the landscape in Iraq, is it possible that any of it was put to some kind of primitive industrial use?

Back in 1991, a German epidemiologist, Dr. Siegwart Horst Gunther, apparently found that kids in the southern part of Iraq had been falling ill, and that these kids had been collecting spent DU shells. This made me think of some radioactive substance (cobalt, I think) which got used as scrap in some country (India, I think) and got processed into a bunch of (highly radioactive) metal chairs.

So the stray thought did cross my mind: given that Iraq spent some years under embargo, is it possible that some of the DU from the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War got used for industrial purposes?

What helped this thought is something I read in the International Herald Tribune in the last week or so - this year, a bunch of people in Iraq scavenged useful barrels (plastic barrels, if memory serves) from some kind of governmental site, and used them for storing drinking water and so forth. Before being used, the barrels had to be emptied, since they contained mud ... uranium yellowcake, apparently.

In a country with such a combination of poverty and igorance, it would be easy enough to imagine some well-meaning entrepreneur finding a use of some description for the DU bounty so liberally bestowed upon southern Iraq during the days of Desert Storm.

But that, of course, is just speculation.
Japanese language study material that I'm starting to develop. Also, I have a couple of essay pieces to finish off.

Meantime, I'm continuing work on the BAMBOO HORSES novel. Work on this has been going very slowly, but I'm gradually building up a bit of momentum. I'm trying to work on this every morning on the train going to wherever it is I'm going to work that day. Mornings are not my most creative time, but, for the long haul job of writing a novel, I find it helpful to be working at sixty percent of capacity rather than a hundred percent.

I guess that sounds a very strange thing to say.

To put it another way: when evening comes, and I'm riding the peak of my metabolic wave, the ideas can be sparking at a furious pace, but I may not want to settle down and actually develop the ideas. So working on the train in the morning may be more productive, even though I'm not at my best in the mornings.

What happens with BAMBOO HORSES is that I work on the train, and by the time I've got to where I'm going (which, over the last few weeks, has generally been taking between an hour and an hour and a half) I find that I've hit a problem of some kind.

And then, when I settle down to work the next day (and I have been trying to work on this project on a daily basis) I generally find that the problem has been solved. The problem-solving process has been pretty much automated.

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Section 45 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 June 14 Saturday.
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After a lot of pretty helpless thrashing around, trying to do online research into depleted uranium, I've finally found a lode of documents. The search engine trick was to look for "free medical information" rather than "depleted uranium".

This allowed me to sidestep the million and one depleted uranium pages, a lot of which are disturbingly cranky, and arrive at the site of the United States National Library of Medicine where you can drill down to a huge collection of references and abstracts from over 4600 biomedical journals.

Once having arrived, you can punch "depleted uranium" into the search box and get real scientific documents, for example the abstract for "Military use of depleted uranium: assessment of prolonged population exposure" by Giannardi C, Dominici D., which deals with "a residential farming scenario". This says, in part:-

Critical pathways and groups are identified in soil inhalation and ingestion; critical group is identified in children playing with the soil. From the available information on DU released at targeted sites, both critical and average exposure can produce toxicological hazards. The annual dose limit for the population can be exceeded within a few years from DU deposition for soil inhalation. As a result, clean up at targeted sites must be planned on the basis of measured concentration, when available, while special measures must be adopted anyway to reduce unaware exposures.

I found this lode of documents while I was in the process of updating my war links page.

Incidentally, right at the moment, the above database has a special list of SARS-related documents. You see a little notepad graphic - if it's blank white then there is nothing to read, but if there are some lines on the notepad then there is at least something to read.

Here is the link to the SARS documents.

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