Munich

A WHO team is in Iraq to examine health patterns in the aftermath of 1991's Gulf conflict. Credit: AP/US NAVY

The World Health Organization (WHO) is to work with Iraqi scientists to assess claims that the incidence of certain diseases has increased in Iraq as a result of NATO's use of weapons containing depleted uranium.

A group of WHO experts visited Iraq late last month to discuss how best to design a study to investigate the claims.

Iraqi scientists say that the use of depleted uranium during the 1991 Gulf War has led to an increased occurrence of at least six types of cancer, and to changes in their characteristics. Renal disease and congenital malformations have also increased, they claim.

Abdelaziz Saleh, from the WHO regional office in Cairo, led the visiting group. “It is not possible to comment on the Iraqi data yet,” he says. “But we are preparing a good study design that will allow the questions to be answered definitively.”

But definitive answers could be difficult to obtain. An expert on depleted uranium at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency says the situation in Iraq is an “epidemiological nightmare”.

Not only is it unclear whether Iraq has a reliable basis for collecting health data, the expert says, but there are many possible agents that could influence health statistics in postwar Iraq, including poor nutrition and other contaminants left by the war, such as residues from burning oilfields. Moreover, he says, there is no clear account of where the uranium used in the war was deployed.

Barry Smith, of the British Geological Survey, who helped to prepare a WHO report on depleted uranium published in April, says that epidemiology is a useful tool that, together with risk assessment, can help to answer these questions. But such studies require careful investigation of contaminated environments and any potential routes of human exposure. “Both of these can be particularly difficult in post-conflict situations,” he says.