However, that purely measures the number of radioactive decays, and does not distinguish between sorts of radioactivity. Beta particles (electrons or positrons) can be dangerous, IIRC, and gamma rays of course are outright bad for your health.
Uranium has alpha decay, which is pretty much harmless if it's outside the body. DU inside your body is more dangerous chemically than radioactively.
That said, DU is quite toxic chemically. The amounts used, however, is fairly small overall, and given the nature of Fallujah operations, which did not require the allies to destroy any significant amount of rebel armor, leads me to believe something other than DU was the primary cause. It's also possible, indeed likely, that there is a range of causes which are individually minor and consequently difficult to pinpoint.
Going to the study:
Between Jan 2005 and the survey end date there were 62 cases of cancer malignancy reported (...) including 16 cases of childhood cancer 0-14 (...).
(...)
There were 34 deaths in the age group 0–1 in this period giving a rate of 80 deaths per 1,000 births.
That's a rather small sample, at least some of the difference could be simply due to that. Clearly a few more infants died as a result of the breakdown during the assault and in the aftermath. Damage to infrastructure, fear, reduced quality of living and such could all play a role. We're talking about one extra death per month overall, and the nature of the events taking place in Fallujah at could all account for at least some of the extra deaths.
Moreover:
The total population in the resulting sample was 4,843 persons with and overall response rate was better than 60%.
This is rather poor and could lead to error margin significantly higher than the discrepancy, given that it's quite reasonable to assume people who did suffer from a death of a child or a cancer in the family were more likely to respond than the ones who didn't. The article does later state that "almost all" of the "approximately 30%" were from one area, but doesn't elaborate much further. The study makes some effort to address that problem, but we're largely supposed to take their word for it.
The only solid thing to go on is this:
The ratio of boys to 1,000 girls in the 0–4, 5–9, 10–14 and 15–19 age cohorts in the Fallujah sample were 860, 1,182, 1,108 and 1,010 respectively suggesting genetic damage to the 0–4 group (p < 0.01).
While this is anomalous, so is the number of boy versus girl births in the 5-19 age groups, suggesting small sample size problem. Indeed, the anomaly in the 5-9 age group is half the size of the 0-4 age group. While this is suggestive of a problem, calling such flawed statistical analysis anything more than suggestive and something that should be checked more thoroughly is, simply put, wrong.
Something else struck me out, it's from the table they pulled the numbers of births and deaths from. I can't parse it here, but I'll improvise.
0-4 age group: 234 males, 272 females
5-9 age group: 481 males, 407 females
Why are there so many more kids in the older age group? The study speculates on some reasons, but I think they missed the most obvious one: loss of population due to taking refuge in another part of the country, and the ones with kids being more likely to stay away, or fewer people deciding to create a child, maybe also better access to contraceptives. This is speculation on my part, but it's more likely than anything the study presented (they acknowledged some of scenarios as highly unlikely).
I'd say their time would be better spend scouring the city with Geiger counters and dosimeters. If the problem is indeed radiation they should be able to find it.
McHrozni
