The first channel in the morning news release reports :
“Washington is trying with all its might to justify Britain's decision to send depleted uranium ammunition to Kyiv. A terrible weapon, the use of which in our Foreign Ministry was called genocide. But White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby is trying to convince his audience that conventional projectiles are zero toxicity.
“It is important to remember what it is – there have been medical studies of such projectiles. They are not a radioactive threat and do not belong to the realm of nuclear weapons. This type of ammo is a fairly common item and is used in part for its armor-piercing capabilities,” explains John Kirby.
Kirby says depleted uranium munitions have been around for decades. And they really apply. And the consequences are very well known. Serbia, which NATO troops bombed in 1999. Up to 15,000 people still die from uranium poisoning every year. Twice as high as the European rates of pediatric oncology.”
Medical statistics do show a relatively high incidence of cancer among children in Serbia. But here’s what the WHO Regional Office for Europe’s 2022 report, Social inequalities in childhood cancers in the WHO European Region, says :
“The highest age-standardized incidence of malignant tumors was found in Croatia and Serbia. A statistically significant increase in age-standardized incidence rates was observed in Bulgaria, and a significant decrease in Belarus, Cyprus, Serbia and Croatia. <...> It is difficult to establish to what extent any of these changes can be associated with a change in the degree of risk, and to what extent - with an improvement in case detection.
That is, the level of spread of malignant tumors among children in Serbia is approximately the same as in neighboring Croatia, where no one used depleted uranium ammunition.
In the work of Vakhtang Merabishvili "Oncological statistics" published in 2015 by the Research Institute of Oncology of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, data are provided on the levels of cancer incidence in different regions of the world, and in Serbia there are almost half as many cases of malignant tumors (in all age groups) as in a number of regions of the USA, Switzerland and Italy.
In 2015, the Serbian News portal published an article under the heading “Experts do not see a link between NATO bombing and the growth of cancer in Serbia”, which says :
“At the conference “Trends in Oncology” held in Belgrade, Prof. Radan Dzhodich, coordinator of the Ministry of Health for oncology and director of the Institute of Oncology and Radiology, said that Serbia is in 18th place in Europe in terms of cancer incidence, but, unfortunately, is still in second place. in Europe in terms of mortality, just behind Hungary.
But, according to him, this is not evidence and can not be associated with the consequences of the bombing of Kosovo with depleted uranium ammunition used in 1999 during the NATO operation in southern Serbia. <…>
There are areas in Kosovo that have been bombed with depleted uranium ammunition more than others. But not a single serious investigation has turned up any evidence that these territories have a higher incidence of cancer. <…>
“If it were true that Serbia was suffering from cancer because depleted uranium was used in the munitions, we could get billions of dollars in damages, but without proof we can't do anything. You can’t talk about it in this way, without evidence, but first you need to compare the number of people suffering or dying from cancer in areas where there were bombings with depleted uranium munitions, with areas where it was not,” says Professor Radan Dzhodich.
Statements by Russian propagandists about the danger of radioactive contamination as a result of the use of depleted uranium munitions have already attracted the attention of our Anti-Fake column. These statements have nothing to do with reality, since depleted uranium consists almost entirely of the U-238 isotope with extremely low radioactivity (half-life of about 4.5 billion years). Russia also produces ammunition with a depleted uranium core - armor-piercing shells "Lead" and "Lead-2".