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Thursday, May 31, 2012

Busby Spreads Lies

This is a rather long documentary (video below the fold) about health effects from war.  Guess what?  There are bad health effects beyond the direct consequences of getting shot or bombed.  But Busby tries to promote that depleted uranium is a significant source of indirect consequences as a result of his "study", which I can't link to but you should be able to find it ("Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq, 2005-2009" in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health).

The first half of the documentary deals with the use of phosphorous (I recommend you just skip it).  At about 25 minutes it says no one has the means to study the health effects of Fallujah, not even the government.  But lo' and behold, they contradict themselves and introduce Busby's "study"!   



His study is based on questionnaires and you'll notice he doesn't even mention DU concentrations or doses in the paper.  I can't imagine a paper that is trying to correlate one thing (doses from DU concentration) to health effects (cancer, etc.), yet only mention one correlate.  How could this paper actually be published?

At about 31 minutes we're "informed" that because the costs associated with storing DU are high, the Army decided to use it.  Rubbish!  The original uranium was mined.  The DU could be cost effectively returned to the mine.  The Army uses DU for its physical properties.

It's not nuclear waste, nuclear waste is waste that results from the fission process.  This includes spent fuel and low level radioactive wastes.  DU is just uranium which is less radioactive (because some of the U-235 has been removed) than natural uranium (which consists primarily of U-238, much less U-235, and much less U-234).

It doesn't cause "harm for eternity", it decays with a very long half-life, and the harm depends on the dose one receives.  Without uranium (and other radioactive substances) we wouldn't have a liquid outer core, to produce a magnetic field, to protect us from the Sun's radiation.  The Sun won't burn for eternity either.

Of course, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence and mutated kids, not much epidemiology.

Here's a pretty good summary of the state of our knowledge on DU.







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