Uranium, AIDS, War or Uranium Aids War

Farfetched or Not so Far...

Uranium Kills! In a previous post I mentioned Winona LaDuke’s call for ‘Cyclical Thinking’, where natural flows and cycles create birth and rebirth. If negative acts occur, the cycle will bring back in unknown ways additional returns. The purpose of this essay is to look at ‘unknowns’ or ‘known-but-not-open-to-the common-ear’ and attempt to connect abstract dots with recent information I had stumbled upon. It is a talking out loud to see if farfetched equations are actually not so far fetched. Can it make sense? Is it already known but not spoken about?

AIDS (Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome), Cancer, and War are some of the most atrocious killers of innocent people across the globe. One of the scariest weapons today is a Nuclear Weapon. Back one hundred years ago, neither AIDS, Cancer, or threats from nuclear weapons or even nuclear power were very foreseeable to the crisis they have come to today.

It is clear that radiation causes cancer. Large amounts of radiation kills and studies regarding the after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 have shown direct evidence that nuclear fallouts can significantly lead to cancers, immune deficiency, leukemia, and other deadly diseases. Scientists, doctors, and researchers, such as Vladimir Chernousenko and Jay M Gould, have recorded their findings regarding wide-spread impacts to public health not just in the immediate area around Chernobyl but groups of populations in neighboring areas in Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and within a radius where wind currents and water flows.  

The US and NATO bombings of the Balkans have had similar findings from the conflicts in the 1990’s. The uranium from the bombs dropped in Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia have resulted in a rarely spoken in the media human cancer epidemic and an environmental disaster that will continue decades after the actual conflict had ended.  Reports from doctors such as Doctor Slavko Zdrale have noted specific types of cancers in locals, and European and American soldiers since. Similar findings are occurring in Iraq.

Nuclear Power is dependent on uranium. This is true with the Chernobyl disaster. But also, the War Industrial Complex in the United States and NATO are dependent on uranium for missiles, bombs and other weapons that companies such as Lockheed and Martin produce with uranium.  

Uranium is a by-product of gold. Corporations since the beginning of the 20^th Century have been mining uranium. Nuclear Power industries need uranium to thrive, just as much as the Nuclear Weapon industry. For most purposes, they are one in the same. The earliest mining of uranium was off of the Native American reservations and out of Sub-Saharan Africa.

In Africa, John Gunther has recorded in his book Inside Africa, that Edgar Edouard Sengier observed Belgian uranium mines in the Congo particularly at the key time of World War II, and due to the Belgian’s abhorred relations to the Germans at the time sold radioactive uranium to the United States just before the US used the uranium to make the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. The Belgian company, Union Minicere, had been pulling uranium out of the Congo in areas of Kambove and Katanga throughout the colonial occupation of Africa.

At the same time that the Belgian’s were mining uranium out of the Congo, the apartheid South African government and corporations were profiting on sales to the US military with mines in South Africa and current day Namibia. Mines most likely existed in neighboring Botswana as well. Throughout the 20^th Century, the resources for nuclear weapons, weapons, and nuclear power were being plundered from the African continent. However, the other key region of the world where uranium was being pulled from the environment was in areas allotted to Native American tribes in the United States. Winona LaDuke and Paula Gunn Allen mention the private and military interests in native territories or alongside of native reservations that led to eventually significant statistics of health crimes to the populations.

New Mexico was where the US military first tested the atomic bomb. The Laguna Pueblo had noticed the US government mining uranium in their areas around the late 1930’s. The Anaconda Company’s Jackpile Mine lasted until 1981. Since the discovery of uranium in native territories the environmental damage and health hazards to the local communities have increased significantly. Pulmonary cancers have been linked highly with uranium miners, recorded in research by Joseph Wagonner, Ariel Schurgin, and Thomas C Hollacher.

Not only did the mining of uranium lead to environment and health depletion, but the disposal of Nuclear Waste after uranium is used for nuclear power and weapons led to and continues to lead to some major hazardous regions of the United States. In Nevada, as Winona LaDuke has reported on, the Yucca Mountain is the largest nuclear waste dump in the continental US, where at least 109 nuclear plants have shipped toxic waste to be buried deep below the surface. However, since the birth of the waste dumpsite, the Shoshone Native American tribe has had major fatalities due to related diseases due to the radioactive mountain.

On the US controlled island of Saint Lawrence, between Alaska and Russia, which was a 1952 military base, abandoned in the 1970’s, the Yup’ik Eskimos have had major health problems and fatalities due to the remains abandoned and still not cleaned-up by the US military. The former base continues to pollute the island and the ocean waters that surround it. Even the Navajo reservation near the first testing of the atomic bomb, around the Crown Point Area, has recorded since the 1970’s major health problems due to the irresponsible activities.

Japan’s 2011 earthquake triggering the nuclear fall-out is another key example why nuclear power should not be considered as a clean energy source regardless of media-advertisement.

Immediate results of uranium related activities, whether simple excavation in mines, testing weapons, dropping weapons during war time, or disposing of nuclear waste from power plants, has enormously damaged the environment and attributed to major cancer related diseases. But that is not all.

The mystery behind how the AIDS epidemic in Africa began may be more related to the uranium than we can rationally connect. An Abstract concept, in deed, but not impossible; before cancelling out the absurdity, one must map it out. The largest region plundered of uranium in Sub-Saharan Africa is from the Congo through Angola, Namibia, Botswana, to South Africa. The largest population exposed to AIDS is in deed the same region.   

High levels of critical thinking leads one to ask – Did high doses of radiation from uranium exposure in the mines in Southern Africa, lead to the secret behind how AIDS began in Africa? Radiologist specialists Sternglass and Scheer have considered the potential link.

But first, to build a parallel, lets analyze the involvement of radiation that led to the rise in Hantavirus in the United States. Hantavirus is a deadly disease when humans are in contact with rodent feces. According to the US Army Medical Research Institute, Connie Schmaljohn states, “HPS was first described in 1993 when a cluster of cases of adult fatal respiratory distress of unknown origin occurred in the Four Corners region of the United States (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah). The unexpected finding that sera from patients reacted with Hantaviral antigens was quickly followed by the genetic identification of a novel Hantavirus in patients' tissues and in rodents trapped near patients' homes” (Schmaljohn). Like AIDS, Hantavirus first appeared in the public by unknown origins.  

The leaking of toxic materials into the soil, Paula Gunn Allen notes, created a radioactive hazard. At first slightly unnoticed, except in isolated cases, the outbreak led to the growing awareness that Hantavirus was indeed in existence. Some reports believed that the virus came about when rodents, mice and rats, ate contaminated materials in the soil and water. Radioactive material has been recorded to appear even in areas congested with mushrooms, as seen in areas like the Balkans on mountainsides adjacent to areas bombed during the conflict in the 1990’s. The toxic chemicals from uranium weapons biologically cycle through the environment and nature attempts to mutate the waste, which is one reason locals in areas along mountains are recommended to not eat certain mushrooms. If mushrooms are natures way of recycling toxins, it is possible to connect that not all animals, such as rodents, will be as affected by toxic waste as humans would be. Hence, rats and mice that carry Hantavirus, which appeared in areas like New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, trekked through the very areas where there was nuclear waste and uranium depleted soil, and can possibly carry a deadly disease to humans but not be at harm.

Yes, absurd to connect the details in such a way. But areas heavily mined by local populations in southern Africa could have been exposed to uranium’s harmful after-effects without awareness and then the exposure could have mutated in the body, followed with spreading the new virus to others they came in contact with.  If this is true, then it could very easily be true for some people to say that ‘the White man did bring AIDS to Africa’. Industry’s excessive greed to mine uranium out of the continent during the colonial period and today parallels the rise in AIDS. AIDS emerged in the public eye in the early 1980’s. Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome, like the effects of chemotherapy radiation, begins by depleting the human body of its immune system. Let’s come back to this thought…

The rates of HIV in Russia and Eastern Europe have significantly increased since 2001. Is there a correlation between the Chernobyl catastrophe and the increase, regardless to the increase in drug use, sexual relationship standards and the lack of social health institutions that vanished after the end of the Cold War? Maybe, or maybe not, but if the environment has depleted their immune systems, the environment may have led to the bodies inability to fight off the virus.

Perhaps as Hantavirus passes toxic exposure from soil to rodent to man, AIDS bypasses the rodent and is a connection of toxic exposure passed from soil to human to human.

The connection with uranium and AIDS from the research from Brown University of Dr. Ernest Sternglass and Dr. Jens Scheer are tied with the similar destruction of the immune system and mutations due to radiation exposure. Other doctors such as David S. Greer and Lawrence S. Rifkin were quoted as early as 1985, in an LA Times and New York Times matching articles, stating the similarities between the effects of nuclear fallout and AIDS: "Since large numbers of the survivors of nuclear war can be expected to have immunologic deficits like those in individuals with AIDS, a marked increase in the incidence of AIDS and AIDS-related diseases should be anticipated" in the event of such a war, the report said. "Epidemics . . . are likely in the months and years following a nuclear attack."

In her 1985, LA Times news article Marlene Simons stated that David S Greer’s findings reflected that “diseases likely to occur after such an attack include tuberculosis, leprosy, pneumonia, legionnaire's disease and cancer, the report said, as well as the illnesses most commonly associated with AIDS, Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer, and Pneumocystis carinii, a respiratory infection” (Simons).  

Dr. Greer was quoted saying, “The abnormalities of the immune system found in AIDS patients are marked by an "absolute depression" of these "helper" T-cells. Basically, these "helpers" direct other immune-system cells to attack invaders such as cells of tumors, disease-causing bacteria and viruses.”

Cancer rates in the world are at a record high and will only increase as long as the technologies that we use to power society is profit-driven and not health-driven. Cancer is directly connected to exposure to radiation whether one can pinpoint which direct exposure triggered the rise in depletion of health. Uranium has been directly or can be directly connected to major disasters that used weapons or enriched materials, such as Chernobyl and NATO bombings in the Balkans and Iraq.

Why is AIDS quickly discounted in the connection? I’m extrapolating, thinking out loud, maybe there is some level of correlation. The truth is that what the public has been informed or exposed to about the roots of AIDS is limited and small. In the future, all the knowledge about AIDS today will be looked at as primitive and all our assumptions will be clarified, perhaps one hundred years from now. Just look at our knowledge of diseases today compared to one hundred years back. 

But Uranium still kills. It seems most people do not even understand what uranium even consists of. But the sales are political and controversial.  Even as of today, September 14, 2012 in ‘Uranium Investment News’, the United Arab Emirates Nuclear Program was granted funding while the Iran Standoff escalates, the Australian Government remains silent on its own Uranium Mining efforts, in Canada, outside of the Athabasca Basin, the Kivalliq Energy Corporation is advancing Northern Canada’s Highest Grade Uranium Project, and in India the protests towards the opening of the Koodankulam nuclear power plant has been mostly ignored by the government, reflecting little concern for public distrust of claims that it is safe or inclusive to the greater populations health and future.