i am pleased to be here tonight because i think it's good that we continue to have public forums in which this issue is discussed i was first made aware of it  in nineteen ninety i think it was ninety five i went to iraq with the human rights project as you remember we had put sanctions on iraq at that time and we were cutting off all kinds of food and medical supplies and everything else and in that trip we would not only to baghdad but also to pass or where i went to the pediatric hospital and where dr hasan was  working some of you have probably met her here in seattle and she showed me pictures of the childhood deformities and the numbers of all the childhood leukemia is that it occurred in that area she said that at that point the mother would ask when the baby was born is the child not is it a boy or a girl but is it normal that was the question that was asked  mothers in iraq at that point i came back and talked to a number of people in the united states about ending sanctions and the all the things that we now bulldoze are going to zation ultimately give us credit for killing a half a million iraqi children because of our sections so our impact on iraq has already been extensive the question is how much more of it are we going to get from the toxic chemicals related to depleted uranium and other things that have happened i'm sorry i can't stay tonight and listen to dr elsa bach and his colleagues talk about this but it is clear that we have rained down death on iraq in huge numbers and huge amounts and it is something that i have tried at least four or five times now to get the military to do a study to actually look at what they've done soldiers have been impacted by it and we know it we don't know why they have what's called gulf war disease well some of it was from walking around down in the basra area after the route of death went through there we have created toxic fumes and whatever that have affected our own people so it isn't just the iraqis it's our own people we're doing it too now i heard my bit history enough to know that the reason i'm concerned about it and the reason i was against going to iraq was i knew what we were going to do and i'd ha been and i've seen war and i also remember a phenomenon called agent orange when i was in after the war was over in seventy seven seventy eight i was working here in seattle at the pacific health pacific science packet down on the north end of beacon hill and saw people with the results of agent orange which had been denied by the military and denied and denied that i the military does not want to admit they do not want to study they don't want to find out what the impact wall term is of their weaponry and so they are really resisting they're looking at depleted uranium any other things that they did in this war much as they refused to look at it to please asian orange we are still dealing with the effects of people with kidney tumors and other things from aging or each and every one was told oh that's nothing just just rinse it off you're all right you don't have any problem well it turned out they did have a problem so what you're seeing here is now a systematic denial for the second time of the effects of the things that we use in war are are having effects on people and the thing that is most troubling about this are an added level of troubling this is that we have now raised war up to forty thousand feet we decided we will put any boots on the ground we're going to do it all from the air ok so to shoot in missiles or we shoot in whatever use all the method three that's now being used to insulate the american public from understanding what they are doing to the world and i it's troublesome because not only is it awful for what we're doing to the iraqi people and the syrians and everybody else was being exposed to it now we are also denying our boy who we are and what we're doing and if you can't see what you're doing you're in bad trouble because you're doing things to the world for which they don't forget we're building up a reservoir of anger in the world that i think we're going to pay for for a very long time so tonight's is to give you some facts to go out and talk about it with people and let them know what's going on and it's true i was sitting here talking where's the press anyone who wonder i mean where is the press where is the interest well no we have to in oh we've got to worry about two cases of a bolo or five cases of a bowl in the united states as though that were the most awful thing that was a happening to the united states that we simple workers over there they get sick and come back with the disease and we act like that's a catastrophe and yet here's a catastrophe we have already perpetrated will not face and we're about i expect when we go back after the election but actions on the fourth of november will be all one till the eleventh the veterans day and as soon as we get the veterans day out of the way we'll go back and begin the issue of troops on the ground know whether the troops on the ground are going to be contractors mercenaries which is really what they are or they're going to be our own troops is a question that will be fought out in the congress in very short order i think in  november so this is why this is a timely event for people to think about what it is that we do when we go to war and i am sorry that i can't be here to hear dr also box  talk but i believe it would only stand people here with they'll bring me back the report thank you very much and then we'll have some question and answer at the end so both our visitors are here today as a part of a multi university speaking tour are they we are the last stop the trip that took them to a couple of universities in boston and the university of michigan and princeton and the university of albany and so these sorts of speaking tours are complicated to arrange and and  costly and take energy from the various participants so we're grateful that they were willing to include us in their stop the sponsors of this event to include global watch the women and children program in the department of global health health alliance international the u w department of environmental an occupational health sciences u w department of global health and washington global health alliance discovery  series we had a fantastic planning committee which worked over the last several months to arrange for this visit marion mercer who sitting in the front was the leader of that effort and other people were dear in the department of global health and we're grateful to the united temple university temple united methodist church for making this space available to us today so let me introduce both maternity hospital in iraq and he has documented the rising cancer and birth defect rates in iraq and has linked them to environmental pollution during the wars in iraq and he'll be talking about his practice his observations and his challenges in working in a war zone with rising cancer and birth defect rates the university of washington has a long standing relationship with the academic community and vaster after the united states invaded iraq our university public health community came together to think about what we could do as academics and scientists to promote peace and prevent the effects of war that we knew were about be visited on iraq and we decided something we could uniquely do is create a sister university relationship and so we have had that since we connected with  honey who is a native of iran and she's an environmental tax a coward just based in ann arbor michigan she says there are three of more than two dozen peer reviewed articles and the park and the effects of various pollutants and the female reproductive cycle including by conflict induced pollution and the middle east she's also published on the rise of birth defects in iraq including with her speaker dr ass a back so thank you is my nephew was in the middle this one i have no and the name is still labeled and you see on the front of the head and this is also most of those babies i showed they died and a few of them say survive here to basically put the story to dr also brock said into an environmental context to basically bring to you what are some potential sources of public exposure to war related pollutants that we need to worry about and also maybe try to attract more attention to so that we can maybe resolve it in a way to clean up to do monitoring and clean up of the environment in iraq we've been to so many nobody has come to report our findings it's very disappointing in a way but it tells you that we really need to get this information into the mainstream american media so that regular people i mean you guys are all you know human rights activists people who are really seriously interested in environmental justice and issues like that but they're regular people joe blow is not here so what we need to do is to bring this this story and this information to the mainstream american people who would be who would be pretty impressed by it and they would think they are the people we need on our side if we are going to change anything temperatures it gets very very hot and there is also a lot of a lot of storms dust storms this is a you can see in the face of these women it's a normal day you know they're walking around smiling so lots of environmental pollutants can can get really injected into the air and people will be inhaling it which is a very simple and quick way to get a lot of toxins in your body this is another picture similar again so basically it's very important the temperatures in iraq would allow the highly toxic stuff to get into the air and more frequently and then people would inhale it the same with storms that are very frequent there the first article we were we published the second one actually got quite a bit of international coverage this is the article we published and it was reported on an independent next views basically tells you that we've had quite a lot of international coverage but not so much in inside the united states e quite normal these days there was a woman who was interviewed by the b b c if you weeks ago and she's a doctor in ny jeff actually the city where doctors were comes from and she said that cancers and birth defects are no more common than a regular cold in her city so what we're showing you is a small portion of a much bigger now i don't know if you guys have seen this article that came out on october fourteenth in the new york times and it actually talks about the fact that nerve and mustard compounds or agents were found near baghdad and in two thousand and eight they decided ok this is two it makes the u s look too bad because the u s had sold them to to saddam hussein and they were using it so they decided it's too embarrassing so let's just explode them so they did by doing that because a lot of harm to u s soldiers as well as iraqi people who are nearby now it raises a question in my mind what others think after they did that they suppressed information so we didn't hear it for a long long time so the idea is there is lots of environmental pollutants in iraq that we don't really know about and it comes out once weapons that have you know they're not working anymore weapon systems as they call it so huge huge of pollution that comes out from these kinds of things starting the statistics here that tells you that six billion bullets bullets were fired in two thousand and three about three hundred thousand bullets per individual killed in iraq so that that's quite a lot now how many people have heard here about burn pits i just want to get a general program about approximately a thousand to two thousand metric tons of depleted uranium world was dropped on iraq in two thousand and three having said that we have not found high levels of uranium in the samples we have tested again breathing the smoke and dust in is the major route of exposure to a war related pollutants and this is a little bit about burn pits so basically u large burn pits some of them as large as a football field and just about anything explosives have gone into these burn pits and for about seven years from two thousand and three to two thousand and  ten these have been burning and people who worked on these military bases as well as people who live near and around them would obviously be exposed to the smoke that comes off of them these are a few pictures of by two thousand and eleven had come back to the u s with various ailments a long long cancer and various other health problems and that started and they  managed finally to convince that is study should be done to see what are some of the components of these burn pits and this study by institute of medicine was released in two thousand and eleven it's quite a long study and they basically looked at air samples from u s military bases one big one which is called joint base blood and they found various toxic compounds in it and what what they concluded is that cumulative exposure to these types of compounds  have health consequences for people who are exposed to it for adults who are exposed to it now iraq a population is a mixed population of young and old and growing children who are specifically much more prone to much more sensitive to exposure to these kinds of pollutant later on there was another review of the same thing basically confirming that all of these the disorders would be expected in people who are exposed to burn pit emissions exposed to emissions and then my health suffers from it and they will be eligible for certain kinds of medical help and this is a big victory for u s military soldiers because it is an acknowledgement that there was an and of course they had just burnt it so eventually eventually the u s military soldiers are now able to sue them for for negligence and  ds of them have already started the procedure of suing so quickly about the state of the state of scientific literature on exposure to emissions such as the ones that came out from the burn pits we know that exposure prenatal exposure if a woman is pregnant and she's being exposed to these things it will it will have an effect on her pregnancy and the outcome of her child's health would be endangered basically the general consensus of the of the bridge we've published two papers and the third one is coming up right quickly summarize our findings which basically says that people have been exposed to large amounts of loser we looked at eighty families and we looked at the history of reproduction this is out of the eighty families we looked at and they were for the husband had two wives and it enabled us to look really deep into the history of reproduction as you can see by two thousand and three there are complications with pregnancies in this family and also in this one you can almost like draw a line that the markets two thousand and three baby in two thousand and ten which was which had severe birth so this is very very unusual for three women in a same family to start having children with birth defects around the same time it's  similar ones from best again these are children who were born in fallujah general hospital dr al ani our other collaborator who has helped us with the state or she's not here she was supposed to be to come but war has made  refugee i haven't heard from her for about four weeks now more than three weeks and so it tells you that war makes physicians usually useless a lot of times because they are pushed out of  fallujah compared to children who live in cleaner places these levels are high now lead in mercury are new or toxic compounds and the literature is quite straightforward about it they do cause  up with this which tells you which you can't see how the numbers have gone up amy asked me just now what is it what is the number of birth defects per thousand live births in the united really cannot be explained in the same area except the fact that there was a huge environmental destruction in the form of bombing and all these military bases and these waves that was generated that would be a major major issue that w exposure kind of duplicate itself in buster as well i will share one last slide with you after this but the other star city that we recently got samples from is how we are which is in this area of iraq it's a small city of about forty thousand population in two thousand and three us took over a school in how we judge and converted it into a military base and since two thousand and three virtually everybody lives pretty close distance to this this military base so what we did is again with the doctors and how we had been recently like in the past ten years seeing rise in the number of children with conditions like cerebral palsy neural developmental disorders and be reached out to me and they said well since you've done this other studies could you take a look at the here samples from our children and see what you can find so we  normal children who live across the border now we looked i'm showing you the first slide i'm showing you titanium and magnesium because these are metals that were also found in the lung tissue of u s soldiers who had come back  iraq and there was no explanation for why why these metals in the lungs these are very commonly used in weapons manufacturing titanium industry and mag museum industry i'm sure some of you might know if it's something that you're interested in but they are hugely involved in weapons manufacturing and their footprints you can see in the long of u s military personnel and in the hair samples of children from iraq we case lead it could be a map of other metals like mirchi we were others so how the position of lead to load the position where it's blue and what it allows you to do is to see when the child what it was exposed to the metal  line that forms on the tooth when the child is born because of a change in the diet of the child and that line which is called new nato line would allow you to see how much metal was the child the baby was expos utero and how much afterwards so this is a this is something that is a very intriguing to people who are studying toxicology including myself hopefully we can perfect it and and it helps us have a better tool to measure exposure which will make our studies a lot more accurate in summary we know all of these things we know that people have been exposed to these new toxic metals we know that children exposure to things like titanium lead mercury they are much more sensitive and the result of exposure would be much more severe in pregnant mothers and children compared to adults and we also know that humanity has multiple exposure to or toxic metal does cause new developmental disorder brain damage  born with birth defects what is the government going to do about it eventually there was news that the lawmakers in iraq are going to do something can address this and take a step to find out what's going on eventually there was a study it's cut a little bit but anyway there was a study joint study by w h o world health organization and iraqi ministry of health they came together and they set up a study and they collected lots of samples and the study was eventually released after a lot of demand by the public you've got to release it you've got to release it finally after they released it some of us many people read the report and they were not impressed by it they that it was it fell short of what they should have done and these are some of the criticisms of the study so basically that's where things are at now the study has been quite severely criticized much this is our last stop in our u s campus tour thank you for your attention if there's any questions i know i have said a lot of different things to just make this picture appear you know clear clear but i may have created a lot of questions so i'll be very happy to answer some of them if i can thank you very much