BASRA, Iraq, 9 June 2003 — There is no question 12-month-old Mohammed is very sick.

His skin has a ghostly pallor. His left eye is sealed shut by the huge tumor ballooning from his cheek.

Mohammed is dying of Hodgkin’s disease, and Dr. Mohammed Al-Dorky has little doubt about the cause.

“DU,” he says.

In the 1991 Gulf War, allied forces bombarded southern Iraq with weapons made of a radioactive substance called depleted uranium — DU for short. Al-Dorky and other Iraqi doctors are convinced that exposure to DU caused what they say has been an alarming increase in cancer and birth defects in recent years.

“We live in the same land, by the same river,” Al-Dorky says. “The only difference is the Gulf War. I think DU is the main cause of these problems — even US and British soldiers have suffered from the ‘Iraqi curse.’ “

In the most recent war, American and British forces also used DU weapons and exposed thousands of other soldiers and civilians to its potentially harmful effects. And in doing so the allies revived an angry debate:

Is depleted uranium a major threat to health, as anti-DU activists claim? Or have its dangers been exaggerated, as the Pentagon insists?

“The issue has gone to polar extremes,” says Dan Fahey, a US Navy veteran and expert on DU. “The Pentagon has put a lot of PR effort into saying this is nothing to worry about. Then you have some of the activists saying the United States is using DU as an act of genocide to intentionally cause cancer and destroy the genetic future of the entire population. It’s gone to hyperbole — it’s worse than the Pentagon is saying but not as bad as a lot of activists are saying.”

To date, there has been little study of DU’s effects on humans, though tests on mice suggest it can cause cancer, reproductive disorders and other problems.

The US military monitors only a small group of veterans who were exposed to DU in the ‘91 War. And Saddam Hussein’s government never allowed the World Health Organization to investigate Iraq’s sensational claims of DU-related illnesses and birth defects.

With the old regime gone and the latest war over, experts say it is time to get a better handle on DU. “It is highly unsatisfactory to deploy a large amount of a material that is weakly radioactive and chemically toxic without knowing how much soldiers and civilians have been exposed to it,” says Brian Spratt of the Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy.