12/3/98
Philadelphia Inquirer

By John Donnelly

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An American veteran of the Persian Gulf war came to the capital of her old enemy yesterday seeking information about a mysterious illness that afflicts her and tens of thousands of other soldiers who served in the 1991 conflict.

Carol Picou's suspicion and that of many other gulf war veterans is that they were sickened by U.S. ammunition tipped with a radioactive material called depleted uranium.

"I came to hear what you have found in your research and compare it to what we have found," Picou said from a podium in front of a huge black-and-white photo of a young Saddam Hussein at a symposium sponsored by the Iraqi government.

"If you look at me and at the Iraqi soldiers who are here today, we don't look like we're so sick on the outside. But inside, the pain we face on a daily basis is excruciating," she told about 300 people, mostly Iraqis, in a hotel ballroom.

Picou, who is from Allentown, Pa., was a nurse during the gulf war. She said she had neurological damage and her muscles had deteriorated. She uses a catheter to urinate -- "all because of what I was exposed to during the war," she said.

A Western diplomat later said: "Her few words earned the Iraqis a lot of propaganda points abroad."

In recent years, U.S., Canadian, European and Iraqi scientists have looked increasingly at depleted uranium as a cause of many unexplained illnesses after the war, including higher rates of cancer among children in southern Iraq.

Until recently, Defense Department officials have suggested that some of the illnesses may have been caused by chemical emissions during the war or other environmental hazards already present in Iraq.

But at a presidential advisory committee hearing last month, Bernard Rostker, head of the Pentagon unit investigating gulf war illness, said it was too early to rule out depleted uranium, a dense metal that helps munitions pierce armor, as a factor in veterans' illnesses.

About 750,000 U.S. troops served in the war. Of those, about 100,000 have complained of health problems, and 20,000 have unexplained symptoms, Rostker has said.

On the first day of a two-day conference, Iraqi scientists presented only a few new conclusions aimed at showing the widespread use of depleted uranium. One study reported that it was found in 36 percent of 154 plant-tissue samples taken in southern Iraq.

Another report showed that prevailing wind patterns during the days of tank battles in southern Iraq were southeast, "meaning that the fumes from depleted uranium went back to the American forces in Kuwait," said Suad Naji al Azawi, a University of Baghdad ecologist educated at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

Sami al-Araji, a top Iraqi Health Ministry official who organized the conference, said that certain cancers in southern Iraq had risen to up to five times the prewar levels.

But such findings were only part of the conference.

The deputy health minister, Showqui Marquis, blasted the United States for using depleted uranium in the battlefield, saying it "reveals before the world community the illegitimate tactics" of the Americans.

The day's events also featured schoolchildren in little suits and long white dresses who belted out songs lamenting the effects of punishing economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait.

Iraqi officials had hoped that the conference would draw many U.S. veterans and Western doctors who have begun research into depleted uranium. But several U.S. veterans rejected the invitation, saying they were concerned that Iraq would use them to advance its battle for an end to eight years of sanctions.