Petition highlights legacy of Iraq war
Report on increase of birth defects in Iraq delayed
An Iraqi paediatrician is petitioning the World Health Organisation (WHO) to release research findings on the increase in birth defects in the country’s hospitals.
Fears are growing that data is being suppressed because it may point to metal contamination during the Iraq war as the cause. The findings were due for release by the WHO and the Iraqi Ministry of Health in November 2012, but publication has been repeatedly delayed. Now paediatrician Samira Alaani has launched a petition calling on the WHO to submit the research findings to an open-access medical journal for peer review.
On the petition site Samira Alaani, who works at Fallujah General Hospital, says: ‘In the years since US forces attacked our city my colleagues and I have recorded a horrifying increase in the numbers of babies born with congenital defects: spina bifida, heart abnormalities and defects that I do not even have a name for.’
Since logging cases in 2006, she has recorded that for every 1,000 live births in her hospital 144 babies are born with a deformity. Increases have been recorded throughout the country. An article in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology reported that in 1995 there were 1.37 birth defects per 1,000 live births at the Al Basrah Maternity Hospital. In 2003 there were 23 cases per 1,000 births.
Friends across the world have been prompted to support the petition at Change.org.
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