cancer

Most of southern Iraq remains polluted with the toxic debris of British and American explosives, including uranium- 238 shells. Iraqi doctors pleaded in vain for help, citing the levels of leukaemia among children as the highest seen since Hiroshima. Professor Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme, wrote in the BMJ: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemo-therapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee].” In 1999, Kim Howells, then trade minister, effectively banned the export to Iraq of vaccines that would protect mostly children from diphtheria, tetanus and yellow fever, which, he said, “are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”.

Chechnya is in the grip of what could be described as an epidemic of cancer... According to the republic’s one working cancer clinic, as many cases were recorded in the first five months of this year as in the whole of 2006. “Today we have 1712 patients, how can you explain that?” said Petimat Khamidova, the head of the clinic.

Khamidova, who has worked in this field for 30 years, said there had never been so many cancer patients before war broke out in Chechnya. “Most frequent are cases of lung cancer, breast cancer, cancer of thyroid gland, skin cancer, gynaecological disorders,” she said. “We used to have very few cases of lung cancer here.”