April 20, 2006

By ELLIOTT WILSON
UW News Lab

Mortality rates in Iraq have increased dramatically due to the effects of war on the environment and public health, according to one prominent environmental-health specialist.

Dr. Wajdy Hailoo, an Iraqi-American researcher, spoke April 12 at Keystone Church in Wallingford. He said Iraq’s infant, child, and maternal mortality rates are rising, and the only number shrinking is the country’s life expectancy.

For decades Iraq has been ravaged by war and suffered through sanctions, said Hailoo, who described how violence has scarred both the country’s land and its people.

Hailoo heads the division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. His visit to Seattle was sponsored by the University of Washington Environmental Health Department, and the event was organized by the Interfaith Network of Concern for the People of Iraq.

During the war with neighboring Iran, Iraq’s lush palm trees were scorched into barren stumps. Verdant marshes were drained, turning green waterways into a parched wasteland.

Then came the 1991 invasion of Kuwait, said Hailoo. Deaths rose 8.1 percent from the 1987 total after the war with Iran, as many died from traumatic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The air was bad, the land was polluted, and people were sick.

An audience member who formerly lived in Iraq chimed in, “In those days you would walk on the street with a white shirt, and by the time you got home it was black.”

“ We thought the liberation of Iraq, or whatever you want to call it, would improve it, but it did not,” Hailoo told his audience of about 30 scholars, Iraqi-Americans, and neighborhood residents.

Now there are “oil spills everywhere,” and the food markets are “all garbage and contamination,” added Hailoo, who recently traveled to Iraq.

This war environment has killed many and sickened even more. “Violence and war injuries” are the No. 1 cause of death these days, while dismal air quality has caused many more to suffer from bronchitis, pneumonia, and asthma, he said.

Hailoo cited a 2004 study that recorded a 250 percent fold increase in deaths following the invasion. Even more heartbreakingly, he added, the study found that “women and children were affected the most.”

The problem, said Hailoo, is that as more get sick, doctors get scarcer. “The manpower doesn’t exist,” he reiterated.

“ Two thousand general practitioners graduate each year, and yet there are only 3,000 practitioners in Iraq,” said Hailoo, who received his medical degree there, at the University of Mosul. “They all just left the country.”

The doctor hopes to turn this trend around. As program director for the Stony Brook Environmental Health Program, Hailoo and his team have set up five Environmental Health Education and Resources Centers in Iraq.

The centers are part of an environmental-health program developed by doctors at Stony Brook and in Iraq. Its goal is to train Iraqis to identify and correct environmental-health hazards.

The American team selected deans for the centers, which are located in Baghdad, Mosul, Basrah, Babylon, and Erbil, and then trained the Iraqi doctors at Stony Brook.

In September 2005, doctors, scientists, and researchers from the United States and Iraq came together for a larger conference and training session in Jordan. “I am so happy that they take the effort to do this,” Hailoo remarked about his Iraqi colleagues.

Even “among violence, killings, atrocities,” he added.

“ Now the goal is for these Iraqi environmental-health experts to train and educate the rest of the country,” said Hailoo. n