js7a's Journal: Depleted Uranium Birth Defect Incidence Rate Curve

The more I look at this, the more depressingly foreboding it is. Not the pictures -- I can handle those. It's the numbers and their damned graph:

Incidence rates of congenital malformations
in Basrah 1990-2000

Column 1: Year
Column 2: Number of Births
Column 3: Number of congenital malformations
Column 4: Incidence rate per 1000 births

1990 12161 037 03.04
1991 09845 028 02.84
1992 11800 023 01.95
1993 12416 028 01.31
1994 12250 036 02.93
1995 10576 046 04.35
1996 10470 048 04.56
1997 13653 032 02.34
1998 10186 079 07.76
1999 13905 136 09.78
2000 12560 221 17.60

This crap isn't going away; we're on the front end of the kind of chromosome damage which will stay in families -- AMERICAN AND IRAQI FAMILIES -- for generations. We are so screwed. I wish this was just stochastic market data.

Damn friendly fire and the small-minded soldier boys who spend other people's lives trying to convince each other it's no big deal. Damn the NRC and the Health Physics Society.

Just keep reminding yourself that any apparently exponential proportion of a finite population has to be a sigmoid.