Professor plays down uranium ammo health fears
A leading British medical expert has cast doubt on a link between depleted uranium shells and leukaemia in soldiers who served in the Balkans.
Professor Eric Wright, from the University of Dundee medical school, said it was "implausible" that the eight Italian soldiers who died of the disease had contracted it from the ammunition while serving in Kosovo.
And he said what had been "overlooked" in the debate over the issue was that depleted uranium (DU) in the environment was not a major source of radioactivity.
Professor Wright said: "The disease is usually diagnosed five or 10 years after exposure. Where we are talking about six Italian soldiers diagnosed a year after serving in Kosovo it seems implausible to be due to radiation exposure there.
"There were something like 150,000 soldiers in Kosovo, and 17 of them have been diagnosed with leukaemia," he said.
"At first it seems high. But it works out to 10 deaths per 100,000 people. The rate in Britain is 11 deaths per 100,000 people. It is not inconceivable that what we have here is a cluster."
The professor, who lectures in experimental haematology at the university, said a cluster was not proof of a causal link between two factors, but an essentially random event.
"It is like asking why three buses come at once, in statistical terms," he said.
But he added that what had to be considered and had been "overlooked" was the chemical effects of depleted uranium.
He said: "Uranium builds up in the kidney and damages it chemically. That is something which merits further investigation."
