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Dieter Hannush: UN World Food Program Emergency

Support Officer"We are on the point of no return in Iraq. More and more people spend their whole day struggling to find food for survival. The social fabric of the nation is disintegrating. People have exhausted their ability to cope."

Illnesses

Diarrhea

Respiratory infection

Nutritional anemia

Vitamin and iodine deficiencies

Malaria

measles

Government rations only cover about half the food a family needs and don’t include any meat at all

Nemya: 2-years-old Father grips her death certificate while talking to a doctor moments after she died from meningitis in a quarantined room at the hospital. A 50-cent tube could have saved the youngster's life, one doctor says. But the hospital has none. Impossible to obtain under the sanctions, another doctor says

MAI report for October 1994

'The situation has deteriorated sharply in the six months since MAI' s last visit.., The major concern of most Iraqis is the question of how to feed their families . . . A severe deterioration is detectable in all the hospitals visited by MAI... further deterioration had been hard to imagine . . . Basic medicines and equipment are missing, while the numbers of sick and under nourished children continue to rise. The result is a deepening crisis which affects not only the present, but also the future...'

Doctors in Iraq make $30 U.S every 10 months.

Chemo therapy drugs cost $30 U.S. every 4 weeks.

“We are in the process of destroying an entire country”

it has been estimated that Iraq needs at least $2.1 billion every 6 months to spend on food and medicine

Ambulances held up for months because the committee felt that the ambulances might come in handy as military vehicles

UNICEF estimates that 5,000 - 6,000 children die every month.

Prior to 1990…

Iraq had one of the most developed education and health care systems of any country in the Middle East.

Literacy and schooling rates were among the highest in the Middle East.

Doctors from Iraq studied in top medical institutes all over the world

In 2001, after 11 years of sanctions…

30% of children under age five suffered from chronic malnutrition, an increase of over 90% in eleven years.

One in every eight Iraqi children will die before first birthday, an increase of over 110% in eleven years.

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 2001

The U.S. Army acknowledges the hazards in a training manual, in which it requires that anyone who comes within 25 meters of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin protection, and states that "contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption."

Pentagon: Government Report (last updated on Dec. 13, 2000)

Which said DU is "40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium."

It also said, "Gulf War exposures to depleted uranium (DU) have not to date produced any observable adverse health effects attributable to DU's chemical toxicity or low-level radiation…”

Karen Parker: A lawyer with the International

Educational Development/Humanitarian

Law Project Depleted uranium fails all four rules derived

from all of humanitarian law regarding weapons:

Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle, defined as legal military targets of the enemy in war. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle.

Parker Cont’d

Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that is used or continues to act after the war is over violates this criterion.

Weapons may not be unduly inhumane.

Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment

Depleted Uranium (DU)

Hardan says that within the next two years he expects to see significant rises in congenital cataracts, anopthalmia, microphthalmia, corneal opacities and coloboma of the iris – and that is just in people’s eyes.

DU Cont’d

Add to this foetal deformities, sterility in both sexes, an increase in miscarriages and premature births, rise in cancer rates, congenital malformations, additional abnormal organs, hydrocephaly, anencephaly and delayed growth.

Birth Deformity Rates

in 1989 there were 11 per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000 births

Cancer Rates

In 1988, 34 people died of cancer; in 1998, 450 died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths.

The Children

Laith Hassan Al-Deen, boy, 1; leukemia

Ali Rafah, girl, 11; leukemia (3)

Mortada Ahmed, boy, 1; leukemia

Haider Fauzi, boy, 4; leukemia

Najla Holla, girl, 5; malignant lymphoma

Ali Faisal,boy, 14; malignant lymphoma

Muhammed Karim, boy, 4; bone cancer

Maryam Mahdy, girl, 1, leukemia

Haras Nashuad, boy, 3; kidney cancer

Sabrine Karim, girl, 11; neuroblastoma

USA vs. Iraq: Big losers are the children