Legacy's of War

Published on Friday, April 13, 2012 by Common Dreams

Legacy of US Weapons-Caused Birth Defects Still Haunts Iraq

- Common Dreams staff

War's cruel legacy continues to unleash itself on the children of Iraq as weapons used by the U.S. have left Iraqi children with horrific birth defects, and the problem shows no signs of abating, Inter Press Service is reporting today.
"In 2004 the Americans tested all kinds of chemicals and explosive devices on us: thermobaric weapons, white phosphorous, depleted uranium...we have all been laboratory mice for them," hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi told Inter Press Service (IPS).
IPS notes that the Iraqi Health Ministry, in close collaboration with the WHO, is set to embark on its first ever study on congenital malformations in the governorates of Baghdad, Anbar, Thi Qar, Suleimania, Diala and Basra this month.
Iraqi children being born with birth defects has been devasting families for years. A July 2010 study showed that increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the heavily bombarded city of Fallujah surpass those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
And the Guardian reported back in 2009 that Falluja doctors were "dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants, compared to a year ago, and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting."

* * *

Inter Press Service: Those Laboratory Mice Were Children

FALLUJAH, Iraq - At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don’t want to talk. "Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone," says hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi. "It’s all too shameful for them."
"We recorded 672 cases in January but we know there were many more," says Hadidi. He projects pictures on to a wall at his office: children born with no brain, no eyes, or with the intestines out of their body.
Facing a frozen image of a child born without limbs, Hadidi says parents’ feelings usually range between shame and guilt. "They think it’s their fault, that there’s something wrong with them. And it doesn’t help at all when some elder tells them it’s been ‘god’s punishment’."
The pictures are difficult to look at. And, those responsible for all this have closed their eyes. [...]
Researchers found there had been a 38-fold increase in leukaemia (17-fold in the Japanese locations). Reputed analysts such as Noam Chomsky have labelled such conclusions as "immensely more embarrassing than the Wikileaks leaks on Afghanistan."
Samira Alaani, chief doctor at Fallujah hospital, took part in a study in close collaboration with the World Health Organisation. Several tests conducted in London point to unusually large amounts of uranium and mercury in the hair root of those affected. That could be the evidence linking the use of prohibited weapons to the extent of congenital problems in Fallujah.
Other than the white phosphorus, many point to depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive element which, according to military engineers, significantly increases the penetration capacity of shells. DU is believed to have a life of 4.5 billion years, and it has been labelled the "silent murderer that never stops killing."

* * *

The Independent: Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima' (from 24 July 2010)

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.
Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

* * *

The Guardian: Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja (from 13 November 2009)

Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants, compared to a year ago, and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting. [...]
"We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies," said Falluja general hospital's director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais. "Before 2003 [the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically." [...]
Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.

Native Peoples take on The Tar Sands

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Decline of Honey Bees Now a Global Phenomenon, says United Nations

Grow Meadows for the Bees,

Published on Thursday, March 10, 2011 by the Independent/UK
Decline of Honey Bees Now a Global Phenomenon, says United Nations
by Michael McCarthy

The mysterious collapse of honey-bee colonies is becoming a global phenomenon, scientists working for the United Nations have revealed.

Declines in managed bee colonies, seen increasingly in Europe and the US in the past decade, are also now being observed in China and Japan and there are the first signs of African collapses from Egypt, according to the report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

The authors, who include some of the world's leading honey-bee experts, issue a stark warning about the disappearance of bees, which are increasingly important as crop pollinators around the globe. Without profound changes to the way human beings manage the planet, they say, declines in pollinators needed to feed a growing global population are likely to continue. The scientists warn that a number of factors may now be coming together to hit bee colonies around the world, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of damaging insecticides, to the worldwide spread of pests and air pollution. They call for farmers and landowners to be offered incentives to restore pollinator-friendly habitats, including key flowering plants near crop-producing fields and stress that more care needs to be taken in the choice, timing and application of insecticides and other chemicals. While managed hives can be moved out of harm's way, "wild populations (of pollinators) are completely vulnerable", says the report.

"The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century," said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director.

"The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of the world's food, over 70 are pollinated by bees.

"Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature.

"Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature's services in a world of close to seven billion people."

Declines in bee colonies date back to the mid 1960s in Europe, but have accelerated since 1998, while in North America, losses of colonies since 2004 have left the continent with fewer managed pollinators than at any time in the past 50 years, says the report.

Now Chinese beekeepers have recently "faced several inexplicable and complex symptoms of colony losses in both species", the report says. And it has been reported elsewhere that some Chinese farmers have had to resort to pollinating fruit trees by hand because of the lack of insects.

Furthermore, a quarter of beekeepers in Japan "have recently been confronted with sudden losses of their bee colonies", while in Africa, beekeepers along the Egyptian Nile have been reporting signs of "colony collapse disorder" – although to date there are no other confirmed reports from the rest of the continent.

The report lists a number of factors which may be coming together to cause the decline and they include:

* Habitat degradation, including the loss of flowering plant species that provide food for bees;

* Some insecticides, including the so-called "systemic" insecticides which can migrate to the entire plant as it grows and be taken in by bees in nectar and pollen;

* Parasites and pests, such as the well-known Varroa mite;

* Air pollution, which may be interfering with the ability of bees to find flowering plants and thus food – scents that could travel more than 800 meters in the 1800s now reach less than 200 meters from a plant.

"The transformation of the countryside and rural areas in the past half-century or so has triggered a decline in wild-living bees and other pollinators," said one of the lead authors, Dr Peter Neumann of the Swiss Bee Research Center.

"Society is increasingly investing in 'industrial-scale' hives and managed colonies to make up the shortfall and going so far as to truck bees around to farms and fields in order to maintain our food supplies.

"A variety of factors are making these man-made colonies vulnerable to decline and collapse. We need to get smarter about how we manage these hives, but perhaps more importantly, we need to better manage the landscape beyond, in order to recover wild bee populations."
© 2011 Independent/UK

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"American families have a fundamental right to clean air and clean water, but this bill is the biggest assault on both in recent history," said Anna Aurilio, director of the Washington, DC office for the advocacy group Environment America. "Americans may have voted for a lot of things in November, but they surely didn't vote for more asthma attacks, more contaminated drinking water supplies and more threats to our treasured national parks." ~CommonDreams

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Carl Sagan still speaks today

Like all children, we all eventually grow up and make our own freedom. In the mean time, while we are still children asking those child like questions and answered by towering moral mature figures who we should be learning life from but discourages thought, imaginations boundaries are narrowed and there leaves little more to learn to know.

Very disturbing findings in chemical tests of Gulf residents

deformed fish

Concern over fish found downstream from oilsands developments in Alberta with discoloured bodies, deformities and rotting flesh have spurred calls for an investigation.

Read more:


U.S. Senators Impressed With Alberta Oilsands Tour

"The oilsands don't have a public relations problem, they have an environmental problem," said Pembina Institute oilsands director Simon Dyer. (Photograph by: Chris Schwarz, Edmonton Journal)



if the fish are too scary you can escape back to your past, if it is still there
http://thewildernessdowntown.com/ kinda back to the future, sorta you need chrome, it is all good, or good to know.


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"In April last year, the international media descended on the village of La Gloria and the surrounding Valley of Perote, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. The village had been identified as the ground zero of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic and reporters came looking for answers as to why the disease may have broken out there. What they found was disturbing." ~Published on Sunday, January 24, 2010 by GRAIN Remembering La Gloria

Oh No

The Better Angels of Our Nature May Face an Uphill Fight in Copenhagen
by Abby Zimet

We could be in big trouble. Polls show that far more Americans believe in angels - 55% - than in global warming caused by human activity - 36%, or about the same number as those who believe in ghosts and UFOs.




My name is Sarah James, and I’m from Arctic Village, Alaska. Climate change, global warming is real in the Arctic. There’s a lot of erosion, because permafrost is melting. When that happens, it runs off, off to another lake, another water, another body of water, when the land gives out. And then, after that, it dries up, and it cause a lot of fire and a lot of erosion. And fire dries up and causes drought.

Amy Goodman interviews victims of global warming, believe ...


My final message will go generally out as a question. This is a general question. I would like to ask you: Would you commit murder? On the basis that you know what you’re doing is wrong and you can see that the victim is begging for mercy and for you to stop what you’re doing, yeah, would you commit murder? I mean, yeah, people who are sensitive at heart would take this seriously, but others, I wouldn’t mention right now.




The World Meteorological Organization announced today that 2009 will likely be the fifth warmest on record and the first decade of this century the hottest since records began.

Meanwhile, here in Copenhagen, the environmental group Germanwatch issued a new report ranking the countries hardest hit by extreme weather based on socioeconomic data. For 2008, Burma topped the list, followed by Yemen and Vietnam. The United States ranked fifth, higher than any other industrial nation. The study also looked at the hardest hit nations over the past eighteen years.




The Obama administration has moved a step closer to regulating greenhouse gases. On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency said six gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, endanger the environment and public health. The move would allow the EPA to take action against greenhouse gases without needing congressional approval.



Naomi Klein and Martin Khor on The Growing North/South Divide in Copenhagen Over Kyoto, Climate Debt and Emission Targets


Devote a few minutes daily at http://www.democracynow.org

BPA

Published on Sunday, November 8, 2009 by the New York Times

Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies

by Nicholas D. Kristof

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It's a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies - to the tune of six pounds per American per year [1]. That's a lot of estrogen.
More than 92 percent [2] of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it - though not conclusively - to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.
Now it turns out it's in our food.
Consumer Reports magazine tested [3] an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.
The magazine also says it found BPA in the canned liquid version of Similac Advance infant formula (but not in the powdered version) and in canned Nestlé Juicy Juice (but not in the juice boxes). The BPA in the food probably came from an interior coating used in many cans.
Should we be alarmed?
The chemical industry doesn't think so. Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council [4] dismissed the testing, noting that Americans absorb quantities of BPA at levels that government regulators have found to be safe. Mr. Hentges also pointed to a new study [5] indicating that BPA exposure did not cause abnormalities in the reproductive health of rats.
But more than 200 other studies have shown links between low doses of BPA and adverse health effects, according to the Breast Cancer Fund [6], which is trying to ban the chemical from food and beverage containers.
"The vast majority of independent scientists - those not working for industry - are concerned about early-life low-dose exposures to BPA," said Janet Gray, a Vassar College professor who is science adviser to the Breast Cancer Fund.
Published journal articles [7] have found that BPA given to pregnant rats or mice can cause malformed genitals in their offspring, as well as reduced sperm count among males. For example, a European journal found that male mice exposed to BPA were less likely to make females pregnant, and the Journal of Occupational Health found that male rats administered BPA had less sperm production and lower testicular weight.
This year, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that pregnant mice exposed to BPA had babies with abnormalities in the cervix, uterus and vagina. Reproductive Toxicology found that even low-level exposure to BPA led to the mouse equivalent of early puberty for females. And an array of animal studies link prenatal BPA exposure to breast cancer and prostate cancer.
While most of the studies are on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that humans with higher levels of BPA in their blood have "an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities." Another published study found that women with higher levels of BPA in their blood had more miscarriages.
Scholars have noted some increasing reports of boys born with malformed genitals, girls who begin puberty at age 6 or 8 or even earlier, breast cancer in women and men alike, and declining sperm counts among men. The Endocrine Society, an association of endocrinologists, warned this year that these kinds of abnormalities may be a consequence of the rise of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and it specifically called on regulators to re-evaluate BPA.
Last year, Canada became the first country to conclude that BPA can be hazardous to humans, and Massachusetts issued a public health advisory in August warning against any exposure to BPA by pregnant or breast-feeding women or by children under the age of 2.
The Food and Drug Administration, which in the past has relied largely on industry studies - and has generally been asleep at the wheel - is studying the issue again [8]. Bills are also pending [9] in Congress to ban BPA from food and beverage containers.
"When you have 92 percent of the American population exposed to a chemical, this is not one where you want to be wrong," said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. "Are we going to quibble over individual rodent studies, or are we going to act?"
While the evidence isn't conclusive, it justifies precautions. In my family, we're cutting down on the use of those plastic containers that contain BPA to store or microwave food, and I'm drinking water out of a metal bottle now. In my reporting around the world, I've come to terms with the threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas. But endocrine disrupting chemicals - they give me the willies.

© 2009 New York Times