WILL troops sent to Iraq this year be at risk of contracting the same mysterious illnesses that plague veterans of the first Gulf war? Barb Goodno of the US Department of Defense has said that centralised medical records would help track illnesses. I asked Lewis Moonie, the British defence minister responsible for veterans affairs, if Britain keeps centralised records.
He told me the answer is no. Each of the armed services has a separate policy. Local medical centres, or ships in the case of the Naval service, hold the primary care medical records of serving personnel, while any hospital treatment is recorded at the hospital where it is given. These procedures all comply with the requirements of the Defence Medical Services Department, which follow Department of Health guidelines.
One of the lessons learned from the 1991 Gulf war, Moonie said, was that medical events were not properly recorded or transferred to permanent medical records. It is now Ministry of Defence policy that all treatments given to troops on deployment be recorded on their operational medical records, and the information transferred to their primary care medical records.
Advertisement
Although central medical records are not kept, anonymised health statistics coded according to the World Health Organization鈥檚 International Classification for Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) are compiled and held centrally.
This leaves me certain about one thing: if mysterious illnesses erupt among military personnel who have returned from Iraq, there will be a furious public reaction.
I LED the Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation from the House of Commons and House of Lords to Bolivia in 2000. While there, the Bolivian vice-president and the ministers we met voiced concerns about forestry matters. I was further alarmed when Fred Pearce exposed the money to be made by planting forests to gain carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol (快猫短视频, 22 March, p 15).
The Noel Kempff Mercado project in Bolivia, which aims to preserve 600,000 hectares of land, is backed by British companies BP and Scottish Power. If the sponsors can sell carbon credits for the forest they plant, they could make up to $200 million. This shows how some landowners could have a real incentive to speculate on being able to claim carbon credits for land they deforest.
This is only one example of a bigger problem: the operation of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which was created under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. I asked Sally Keeble, junior minister at the Department for International Development, about the proposed changes to the CDM and whether these could be detrimental to the environment.
She replied that one issue under negotiation is the date from which land needs to have been free of forest to be included in a CDM afforestation or reforestation project. The European Union, with the support of many developing countries, argues that only areas that were not forest on 31 December 1989 should be eligible. Canada and Japan want to bring this date forward to 1999, arguing that developing countries do not have records going back far enough to cover the earlier date.
The worry, said Keeble, is that changing the date will encourage further changes, and increase incentives to deforest. She said the issue will be decided by the end of 2003. It won鈥檛 be a day too soon.
