That is a nice link... I also found.. I believe another poster was quite idiotic on this issue and would not yeild to being educated. That was before his long absence... LOL...
Ronald Bailey on Depleted Uranium
By Brian Carnell
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Ronald Bailey wrote an interesting survey back in March of research on depleted uranium. As Bailey notes, studies from a wide variety of sources fail to find any negative health consequences from depleted uranium despite the anti-DU rhetoric from environmentalists and some on the Left.
Bailey notes, for example, that the European Union looked at what would happen if someone actually ate significant amounts of deplete uranium,
According to a European Union study released in 2001, "most of the ingested DU (between 98% and 99.8%, depending on the solubility of the uranium compound) will be rapidly eliminated in the faeces." The vast majority of any remaining uranium will be "rapidly cleared from the blood" in a few weeks. Similarly, the majority of inhaled DU dust will also be cleared via the bloodstream and kidneys. The EU report concluded that "exposure to DU could not produce any detectable health effects under realistic assumptions of the doses that would be received."
Similarly, studies by the European Union and World Health Organization also fail to find any evidence that would back up claims by alarmists such as Helen Caldicott that the use of DU in the 1991 Iraq war constituted America's second nuclear war. Bailey writes,
Another 2001 report to the European Parliament compared exposures to DU to those experienced by uranium miners and concluded, "The fact that there is no evidence of an association between exposures—sometimes high and lasting since the beginning of the uranium industry—and health damages such as bone cancer, lymphatic or other forms of leukemia shows that these diseases as a consequence of an uranium exposure are either not present or very exceptional."
The World Health Organization agrees that DU is not a great health risk. Its 2003 fact sheet on the topic declares that "because DU is only weakly radioactive, very large amounts of dust (on the order of grams) would have to be inhaled for the additional risk of lung cancer to be detectable in an exposed group. Risks for other radiation-induced cancers, including leukaemia, are considered to be very much lower than for lung cancer." Another WHO report found, "The radiological hazard is likely to be very small. No increase of leukemia or other cancers has been established following exposure to uranium or DU."
The anti-DU rhetoric plays upon people's fears and misconceptions about anything said to be even remotely radioactive. WHat it doesn't have on its side is much in the way of evidence for its alarmist claims.
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