The Iraqi Children's Tooth Project

This photo was taken in mid-March 2003, a few days before the bombing of Baghdad began. Five year old Atarid was in the hospital being treated for leukemia. His mother, Adra, had just been notified that all cancer patients in the hospital would be sent home to make room for the casualties expected from the imminent bombing. A few weeks later, Atarid died at home of a blood infection.

Since the 1991 war in Iraq, there has been an alarming increase in the incidence of childhood leukemia, other cancers and birth defects. Many suspect these increases are related to the use of depleted uranium [DU] weapons in the 1991 war and the present war in Iraq. Uranium is known to cause cancer and birth defects but there currently is no information on how much DU has entered the bodies of Iraqi children. To obtain this information, Iraqi public health physicians, in collaboration with physicians and scientists in the USA and the UK, have initiated the Iraqi Children's Tooth Project, which will determine the extent to which Iraqi children have incorporated DU into their primary teeth.

This project is sponsored by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-sponsored by the New York City chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. We invite you to join us in supporting The Iraqi Children's Tooth Project.

This project will document the levels of DU contamination in children who live in or near areas contaminated with uranium oxide dust particles derived from the use of DU weapons. These ultra-small DU dust particles persist in the environment for long periods, contain very high concentrations of uranium and are readily inhaled by unsuspecting residents.

Teeth have been collected from 52 Iraqi children, some from areas known to be contaminated with DU, and others from areas thought to be free of contamination. These teeth from Iraqi children will be compared with teeth collected from children living in the USA and Canada and also with 'archeological teeth' from people who died long before the dawn of the nuclear age and therefore could not possibly contain DU.

This study is distinct from those that have measured Strontium-90 in teeth. The physicians and scientists who initiated this project will use state of the art mass spectrometry to measure the uranium isotopes present in the teeth. They intend to publish their results in a peer-reviewed international medical journal. If the results demonstrate that some Iraqi children have been contaminated with DU, we can expect an outcry from the world community and, hopefully, a corresponding mobilization of international public health responses. Such results should also have a sobering influence on U.S. public opinion, since DU weapons are intrinsically indiscriminate and, among the million U.S. soldiers recently returned from Iraq, an unknown number may be internally contaminated with DU as well.

The procedures that will be used to detect DU in Iraqi teeth are based on well established principles of physics and chemistry. They can be used in future studies to investigate domestic sites such as Vieques, Puerto Rico, Albany NY, Concord MA, Fallon NV, the former Jefferson Proving Grounds (in southeast Indiana) which are known or suspected to be contaminated with DU, as well as foreign sites such as Kosovo.

Since the medical and scientific literature has established that uranium is a kidney toxin, a neurotoxin, a carcinogen, a mutagen and an inducer of birth defects, many consider its use in warfare to be a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, or in plain words, a war crime!

We urge you, on behalf of the children of Iraq, to help document the extent to which DU is incorporated into their teeth. The cost of analysing each tooth is $1,000. Please join us in making a contribution to support The Iraqi Children's Tooth Project. You can pay by direct transfer, online with Paypal or by cheque. To donate via Paypal, click on the image below.

Cheques in U.S. dollars made payable to Traprock Peace Center (Iraqi Tooth Project)
should be mailed to:
Traprock Peace Center
103A Keets Road
Deerfield,
MA 01342

Cheques in British pounds made payable to UREG should be mailed to:
UREG c/o
C.A.D.U.
Bridge 5 Mill
22a Beswick Street,
Ancoats,
Manchester
U.K.
M4 7HR

Also, money transfers can be made to the bank account of the Belgian Coalition Stop Uranium Weapons. To do this, donors will need the following information:

Name of Bank: KBC Bank
Bank Account No.: 733-0261889-19
Belgische Coalitie ‘Stop Uranium Weapons’
IBAN: BE39 7330 2618 8919
BIC Code: KREDBEBB
Donors should indicate in the attached message that the money transfer is a donation for the Iraqi Tooth Project.

Thank you for your generosity.

Sincerely,

Thomas M. Fasy, MD, PhD
Clinical Associate Professor of Pathology
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
New York City

Qais Al-Awqati, MB, ChB
Robert F. Loeb Professor of Medicine and
Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
New York City

Cathey E. Falvo MD, MPH
Professor of Community Medicine
New York Medical College
President, New York City Chapter of
Physicians for Social Responsibility

The Iraqi Children’s Tooth Project has been endorsed by the following individuals:

Haifa Zangana: Iraqi author and activist living in the UK Chair of Iraqi Committee for National Media and Culture

Dr. Nadje Al-Ali: Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Co-Founder of ACT TOGETHER: Women’s Action on Iraq

Rashad Salim: Iraqi artist and lecturer living in the UK. Founding Member of IACIS (International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies) Director, IXDU (Iraqi/International Stop DU)

Martin Sheen: Actor and peace activist

Kathy Kelly: Voices for Creative NonViolence

Dr. Helen Caldicott: Nuclear Policy Research Institute

Dr. Rosalie Bertell: GNSH, epidemiologist and environmentalist

Sara Flounders: Producer of film, Poison DUst

Dennis Kyne: Author of Support the Truth

Denis Halliday: Former Assistant Secretary General, United Nations

Dr. David Krieger: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Professor Nobuo Kazashi and Ms. Haruko Moritaki: NO DU Hiroshima Project

Rae Street: Campaign Against Depleted Uranium, UK

Tony Benn: former Member of Parliament, UK

Abstract

Following the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, many populated areas of Iraq became contaminated with fine uranium oxide dusts that are readily respirable. This contamination represents a public health concern because uranium is known to be a mutagen, a carcinogen, a teratogen, a neurotoxin and a kidney toxin.

Although substantial increases in cancer and birth defects have been reported in Iraq after the 1991 war, there are virtually no data on the extent to which Iraqi civilians have sustained internal contamination from the environmental uranium derived from depleted uranium munitions.

Everyone has trace levels of uranium in their body and most of this uranium is stored in bones and teeth. Consequently, the primary teeth or deciduous teeth, that children normally lose between ages 5 and 12 years, represent valuable biologic specimens that can be used to study a child's uranium burden. In this project, teeth will be collected from Iraqi children living in or near areas in south or central Iraq that are known to be contaminated with depleted uranium. These teeth will be analyzed for total uranium content as well as the content of four uranium isotopes: 238U, 235U, 234U and 236U; the resulting data will be compared to similar results obtained from teeth collected from children living in areas (Northern Iraq and North America) which are not contaminated with depleted uranium.

Abnormally low contents of 235U and 234U in a child's tooth and/or the presence of detectable amounts of 236U will constitute very strong evidence that the child has incorporated depleted uranium into his/her body. The analytical methods to be used in this project are sufficiently sensitive to detect the incorporation of depleted uranium levels as low as 1% of the total uranium present in a tooth.

Introduction & Background

Many populated areas of south and central Iraq are contaminated with uranium oxide dust from depleted uranium (D.U.) munitions. This is a serious public health concern because it is clear from the medical and scientific literature that uranium is a mutagen, a carcinogen, an inducer of birth defects (a teratogen), a neurotoxin and a kidney toxin. Indeed, increases in birth defects and in cancer and leukemia (especially among children) have been reported in south and central Iraq following the use of D.U. munitions in 1991 and 2003.

Many believe that inhalational exposures to D.U. dust may have caused or contributed to these increases in cancer and birth defects. Establishing a causal link between D.U. exposure and adverse health effects will require information on how much D.U. is getting into the bodies of Iraqis who live in areas contaminated with D.U. Lamentably, no such information is currently available. These considerations have led to "The Iraqi Children's Tooth Project".

This tooth project is based on the following principles:

1.) We all have trace amounts of uranium in our bodies and most of this is stored in our bones and teeth. Consequently, the "baby teeth" which children normally loose between age 5 and 12 are very useful specimens for analyzing stored uranium; these teeth can be obtained without any invasive procedure and they are readily stored and transported.

2.) In contrast to the natural uranium which may be present at very low levels in rocks and soil, the uranium oxide dust derived from D.U. munitions contains much higher concentrations of uranium (at least 100,000 times more uranium). Moreover, D.U. dust particles are quite small and much more readily inhaled and therefore are vastly more "bioavailable". Consequently, we anticipate that some teeth collected from children living near heavily contaminated areas might have very high contents of DU.

3.) Uranium samples everywhere in this solar system have precisely the same composition of uranium isotopes. In contrast, depleted uranium has a distinctly abnormal composition of uranium isotopes (see TABLE below).

Natural Uranium Depleted Uranium
238U 99.275% ~99.8%
235U 0.720% ~0.2%
234U 0.005% ~0.001%
236U 0 ~0.003%

As its name indicates, depleted uranium is depleted in Uranium-235 and Uranium-234; moreover, D.U. contains Uranium-236, an isotope that does not exist in nature, but is formed only in nuclear reactors. This is so because some of the depleted uranium used to make D.U. weapons is reprocessed from nuclear waste. These two properties of D.U., namely, abnormally low levels of Uranium-235 and Uranium-234 and detectable levels of Uranium-236 can be used as chemical signatures or molecular markers for D.U. These two properties allow the detection of D.U. even within mixtures of natural uranium and depleted uranium. In this research project, if only 1% of the total uranium in a child's tooth was depleted uranium, the resulting isotope composition would be sufficiently abnormal to be detected mass spectrometry.

Although this project is based on well-established principles of physics and chemistry, it is novel in that, to date, there have been no published studies that assess exposure to depleted uranium (or enriched uranium) by analyzing uranium isotopes in teeth. This tooth project is quite distinct from standard children's tooth projects, which measure the strontium-90 content of teeth; in particular, this project will be substantially more costly.

Project Design

To investigate the extent to which Iraqi children have incorporated depleted uranium into their primary teeth, Iraqi public health physicians have collected teeth from a total of 52 children living in three different areas:

a.) 16 from southern Iraq which has been contaminated for 14 years;
b.) 24 from central Iraq which has been contaminated for 2 years and
c.) 12 from northern Iraq which presumably has not been contaminated with DU.

Detailed demographic data on these 52 Iraqi children can be found in the Table on the next page.

In addition to the "control teeth" from northern Iraq, we also will analyze 16 teeth collected from North American children and 12 "archeological teeth" that is, teeth obtained from individuals who died before 1940 and therefore could not possibly have incorporated any depleted uranium [or enriched uranium].

We hope that the results of this study will warrant publication in an elite international medical journal such as LANCET. If we find that some Iraqi children have been contaminated with DU, this will have an impact on the international public health community since uranium is documented to be a mutagen, a carcinogen, a teratogen [an inducer of birth defects], a neurotoxin and a kidney toxin.

This project, "Measurement of Uranium Isotopes in Children's Teeth",
is registered at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Grants and Contracts Office and was assigned the following project number: GCO#05-0505. The project has been approved by the Mount Sinai Institutional Review Board, which reviews all research projects involving human subjects; it also has been approved by the Ethics Committee of an Iraqi medical college.

Project personnel

1.) Iraqi public health physicians have collected 55 teeth from 52 Iraqi children living in different regions of Iraq. These physicians are not being identified by name at this time because of concerns for their safety.

2.) Randall R. Parrish, Ph.D.
Professor of Geological Chemistry
University of Leicester, England
Head, Isotope Geoscience Laboratory
British Geological Survey
Natural Environment Research Council
Kingsley Dunham Centre
Keyworth, Nottingham NG12-5GG, UK
Dr. Parrish will use multi-collector, inductively couple plasma mass spectrometry (MC ICP MS) to analyze teeth for their content of four uranium isotopes: 238U, 235U, 234U and 236U.

3.) Abdulla Al-Shorman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Physical Anthropology
Faculty of Anthropology and Archaeology
Yarmouk University
Irbid, Jordan
Dr. Al-Shorman will provide archeological teeth collected from various sites in Jordan; these teeth will serve as the "gold standards" for this study.

4.) Thomas M. Fasy, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Clinical Professor of Pathology
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
New York, NY
Dr. Fasy is collecting control teeth from children living in New York City, Toronto and Eastern Pennsylvania. He has conducted reviews of the uranium toxicology literature and is raising funds to support the current tooth project.

Professor Randy Parrish, a geological chemist at the Univ of Leicester in England, will be analyzing the teeth. Dr. Parrish has been using state of the art technology to precisely measure uranium isotopes in geological specimens for more that two decades; he has been involved in measuring uranium isotopes in biological specimens for more than five years.

Dr. Abdulla Al-Shorman is a physical anthropologist at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan. Dr. Al-Shorman is interested in environmental dynamics of prehistoric times; he has analyzed isotopes of carbon and of oxygen in prehistoric human teeth and, from the resulting data, made inferences about climate, temperature and diets prevalent in the periods involved.

Dr. Al-Shorman has access to a large number of prehistoric human teeth collected at various archeological sites in Jordan. Approximately twelve of these teeth, which could not possibly contain depleted uranium or 236U, will serve as additional controls in this study.

Dr. Tom Fasy joined a group of US academics that visited Baghdad in mid-January and late June of 2003. During those two visits, Dr. Fasy had the opportunity to meet and subsequently correspond with several Iraqi environmental scientists and public health physicians some of whom are participating in this children's tooth project. Dr. Fasy has participated in several conferences on depleted uranium weapons; he met Dr. Randy Parrish at two such conferences in June 2003 and April 2004 and most recently during a visit to Dr. Parrish's lab in June 2005.