Uranium toxins found in Serbia
Date: 28-Mar-02
Country: SWITZERLAND
Author: Richard Waddington
Nevertheless, they warned authorities to take precautions particularly before allowing development projects, such as house building, on the sites because of the risk of stirring up potentially toxic soil and dust.
"There is no health risk at the moment but we do not know if there could be one if you make major soil removals," team leader Pekka Haavisto told a news conference yesterday.
The team organised by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) went to six areas in the two republics that once formed part of Yugoslavia and found "widespread but low-level contamination" by depleted uranium (DU) at five.
Depleted uranium is used to harden the tips of tank-busting shells fired by NATO during its mid-1990s Bosnia action and again during the air war to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo.
"The study concludes that the DU sites studied do not present immediate radioactive or toxic risks for the environment or human health," UNEP said in a statement, adding that the findings were in line with a similar report last year on Kosovo.
The two reports were ordered after a number of soldiers who served in NATO forces in Kosovo and Bosnia contracted leukaemia, stirring fears that exposure to depleted uranium may have been the cause.
The link has been consistently denied by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which says levels of depleted uranium in the munitions were not high enough to cause cancer.
But lower degrees of exposure have been tied to other health problems, including kidney disease.
Although it was not directly part of the study, UNEP noted in the report that the WHO had also found no evidence to link depleted uranium to chromosome changes reported by Montenegro in six people who carried out de-contamination work at its site.
TRACES IN AIR
Haavisto said that there were 11 sites in Serbia where NATO was known or believed to have fired DU-coated munitions and the team chose the five most representative. There was only one such site in Montenegro.
A site is an area of some 100 sq metres (yards) around the spot where depleted uranium munitions struck a target.
Traces of depleted uranium were found in soil samples and in the air, but there was no sign of any contamination of the water supplies, UNEP said.
The lack of any trace in the water could be due to the fact that uranium in the soil had not yet permeated deep enough to reach the water table, and there was a need for vigilance, Haavisto told a news conference to present the findings.
Haavisto said that drinking water should be tested once a year, adding that the team had been surprised at finding depleted uranium in air samples more than two years after the end of the Yugoslav conflict.
Although the concentration was very low - and the traces had probably been kicked up in part by the excavation work of the team - the fact that they were present at all pointed to the need for caution if building work were undertaken.
"Based on these findings, the authorities should carefully plan how DU-targeted sites are used in the future," he said.
