RIYADH, 7 March 2004 — The United States is working to remove barriers stopping Saudi patients from coming to the country for medical treatment, the US secretary of health said here on Monday.
“We are talking with the heads of our major medical clinics, and I would like to assure all the people in Saudi Arabia that we do want to take care of their severely sick individuals,” Tommy G. Thompson said during a visit to King Fahd Medical City. “We hope that we will be able to resolve this matter so more individuals can come and avail themselves of the medical treatment we have in the US.”
“We are working on this matter extensively with (Saudi Ambassador to Washington) Prince Bandar and the Saudi medical attache. We are hopeful that you are going to see a lot better ways of handling this matter in the future,” he added.
He said the Kingdom and the US were looking forward to better cooperation in medicine, especially over disease control.
“We have discussed very important and critical matters and expressed our will to develop cooperation,” Health Minister Dr. Hamad Al-Manie said.
Dr. Khaled Mirghalani, director of public relations at the Ministry of Health, said that among the subjects discussed was polio eradication and ways of cooperation between the new Saudi Food and Drug Authority and the American FDA.
Thompson said the two countries were looking at ways in which the new food safety division in the Ministry of Health is being set up “and how they can incorporate some of the protocols and standards we have set down many years ago in the Food and Drug Administration in the American Department of Health.”
They highlighted coordination through the international organizations, especially in containing diseases like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Responding to a question, Dr. David Foller from the US Department of Defense denied that a spate of cancer cases in Iraq resulted from depleted uranium used to bomb the country in the 1991 Gulf War.
“It is very important to understand that depleted uranium is 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium,” he said. “And in order to be exposed to depleted uranium it is necessary either to consume it by mouth or to breathe it in or for it to penetrate your body some other way.
“However, it has been studied, and the likelihood of either breathing or consuming uranium is very low,” Dr. Foller said.
“We have conducted studies on uranium miners throughout the world and in the United States in particular, and in that group of workers there has been no increase in disease or cancer associated with uranium,” he said.
“We conducted studies on a military group that suffered penetrating injuries during the first Gulf War, and 74 of these have been followed in military hospitals, and in that group also there has been no additional increase in disease or cancer associated with uranium.
“It is reasonable to say that depleted uranium has not been demonstrated to be a significant health hazard,” he added.
But the official offered no alternative explanation for the dramatic increase in childhood cancers in Iraq following the war.
