{"id":667,"date":"2005-01-04T01:18:37","date_gmt":"2005-01-04T01:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2010-01-23T04:32:32","modified_gmt":"2010-01-23T04:32:32","slug":"so_tg_has_a_fri_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=667","title":{"rendered":"So TG has a friend who works at NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Her friend sent her an email<\/a> linking to a site about Iraq and depleted Uranium; here’s a quote from the site:<\/p>\n

Four of my aunts and uncles are doctors in the main Hospitals in both Baghdad and Mosul. From contact with them, I can only imagine what it does to a doctor’s heart to try to heal, knowingly in vain, a people who now may have become the first victims of irreparable, long-term geno-contamination in human history. Already at the Conference on Nuclear Arms in Hamburg, October 2003, Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, Prof. of Science at the University of Ryukyus, Okinawa, reported the US had dropped on Iraq the equivalent of 250,000 times the radioactive nuclear waste dropped on Nagasaki. Different from Nagasaki, however, the contamination in Iraq is widespread, dispersed over entire regions of the country, bullets, strewn casings, armor, fragments, shrapnel … all containing radioactive waste.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I replied with this email:<\/p>\n

Back to him…here’s a pretty good roundup<\/a>, including a fair number of papers pointing out that there have been no known epidemiological effects from the use of DU; that the most likely mechanism for health effects is heavy-metal toxicity, for which lead would be worse. To my knowledge (and I’ve glanced) there aren’t any peer-reviewed studies since then that show anything different. (I blogged it back in 03)<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He replied to TG with this:<\/p>\n

Dear [TG]:<\/p>\n

\nGiven the overwhelming known evidence of the effects of depleted uranium on US troops who fought during the first Gulf War, and given the Fox News-like tendency in the literature cited by your husband to condemn as “leftist” anyone who is concerned about this problem, perhaps we should just lay aside this dialogue while we’re ahead.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I replied with this:<\/p>\n

XXXX, [TG] passed on to me your comment that “it’s better that we don’t discuss this” because the page I sent over was “Fox News-ish”.<\/p>\n

I’m sorry to have triggered that reaction in you; I was lazy and sent a summary page from a blog rather than the individual links.<\/p>\n

If you’ll look at them, you’ll note that the research cited is from the WHO<\/a>, National Defense Research Institute at RAND<\/a>, European Commission<\/a> (of the EU), Science<\/a> magazine, Nature<\/a> magazine, the Royal Society<\/a>, the U.S. Institute of Medicine<\/a>, and the Federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry<\/a>. It’s not some clowns sitting around in surplus fatigues in front of their computers. As I noted, there has never … to my knowledge … been a peer-reviewed article that suggested that there are meaningful health impacts from DU (as opposed to the real health impacts from living in a place where DU exists because there has been combat).<\/p>\n

I’m a Peter Bienert Democrat who primarily listens to KPCC<\/a>, but I’m also someone who is worried that junk science badly damages our ability to make smart policy decisions and worse, damages the credibility of the environmental movement. We live in an era when we have to assume that our facts will be checked, and where we need to make our arguments both from facts that tell us what the world is and from our beliefs in what kind of word we want it to be.<\/p>\n

And I’m really saddened to hear that you … as someone who makes a living in journalism … would filter what you read by your distaste for the “wrapper” it was presented in. As a consumer of media, let me as gently as possible suggest that until that attitude changes, the credibility and effectiveness of your profession will continue to be under strong attack, and you won’t be able to do the job that is so badly needed – of bringing the truth to the people.<\/p>\n

Marc <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saddened, but not surprised.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal gets a first-hand visit from journalistic bias, by a reporter at NPR who openly refuses to read fact-checking of his shoddy reporting on the “hazards” of depleted uranium (N.B. there aren’t).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}