Birth defects

Nuclear veterans told: No case for compensation

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Ministers tell servicemen who witnessed 1950s test explosions they should have claimed years ago

Barry Hands was on Christmas Island in the 1950's and witnessed Britain's first H-bomb (above)
Barry Hands was on Christmas Island in the 1950’s and witnessed Britain’s first H-bomb (above)

Ministers have been accused of blocking compensation claims brought by hundreds of nuclear test veterans who believe they developed cancers and other illnesses after being forced to witness atomic bomb experiments in the 1950s and ’60s.

Despite pay-outs to former servicemen in the US, France and China, Britain has told its veterans there is no case for offering compensation, and that there is no scientific justification for a full investigation into birth defects suffered by the veterans’ children and grandchildren.

Instead, the Government is relying on studies carried out on the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which failed to establish a link to illnesses found among survivors and their families.

This refusal fully to investigate the human legacy of Britain’s nuclear weapons test programme has come as a blow to the airmen, soldiers and sailors who stood on Pacific island beaches in the late 1950s watching nuclear explosions while wearing little more than shorts and sandals.

Ministers are also defending a legal claim brought by 1,000 British and overseas nuclear veterans and their families on the grounds that the case is time-barred. Ministry of Defence lawyers will go to the High Court next week to argue that the men, who could be entitled to hundreds of millions of pounds, should have brought the case as soon as they knew they had a claim, rather than waiting more than 40 years to start litigation. The Government will also say that the medical evidence does not support the veterans’ claims of cancers linked to their time in the South Pacific.

Read moreNuclear veterans told: No case for compensation

China: Birth defects rose by 40 per cent between 2001 and 2006, linked to pollution

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China’s horrific pollution has been firmly linked to a staggering increase in birth defects according to a major scientific survey.

The number of Chinese children with birth defects rose by 40 per cent between 2001 and 2006, according to the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Around four to six per cent of all children born in China each year have physical defects, including congenital heart disease, cleft palates and water on the brain. Of those, around 30 per cent die and 40 per cent are disabled.

The World Health Organisation estimates about three to five per cent of children worldwide are born with birth defects.

In the first large-scale Chinese survey on the topic, Professor Hu Yali of Nanjing University linked one-tenth of all birth defects in Jiangsu to pollution.

Related article: Stem Cells Undo Birth Defects (MIT Technology Review)

Jiangsu is one of China’s richest provinces and the heart of the country’s manufacturing hub. Professor Hu tracked more than 26,000 pregnant women between 2001 and 2005.

“Birth defects are now the single biggest killer of infants on the mainland,” she told the Nanjing Morning Post. More than a million babies are born in China with “visible defects” every year.

Researchers believe that the figures from Jiangsu may be far lower than the national average. Shanxi, a coal-rich province in the north of China, has the highest rate of defects at 18 per cent and is notorious for the noxious emissions of its huge coke and chemical industries.

“Statistics show that birth defects in Shanxi’s eight large coal-mining regions are far above the national average,” said An Huanxiao, the director of Shanxi’s provincial family planning agency.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai
Last Updated: 4:07PM GMT 09 Jan 2009

Source: The Telegraph

Hold the Spinach, Hold the Lettuce – the FDA Wants to Nuke Our Veggies

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(NaturalNews) The FDA has just announced that food producers may now start zapping lettuce and spinach with just enough ionizing radiation to kill E. coli. The muckety-mucks at the FDA have decided, in their infinite wisdom, to use the American public as guinea pigs in an ongoing human experiment to find out the long-term effects of the consumption of irradiated food.

In spite of the FDA’s insistence that eating food treated with just a wee bit of ionizing radiation is safe, Public Citizen (a consumer watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader in 1971 for the purpose of protecting health, safety, and democracy) believes otherwise (understatement) and is trying to get the word out to consumers about the lies that are being told to the trusting American public.

Read moreHold the Spinach, Hold the Lettuce – the FDA Wants to Nuke Our Veggies