Talk:White phosphorus munitions/Archives/2008/February

Quote from State Dep't in the Use in Iraq (2004) section.

This is in response to the following "edit summary" comment to the "undo" by Hcberkowitz of a change I made,

"(Not sure how the vague "a military publication" is preferable to citing the actual journal. Commented out hearsay from a photographer with no qualifications to distinguish WP burns)"

• I used the phrase "a military publication" to replace the word "article". I also put in a link to that specific publication, which you deleted. But best to just use the wording from the actual quote, I agree.
• You misquoted the source by adding "...in the official U.S. Army..." without square brackets to indicate an editorial paraphrase.
• You mis-attributed the quote (ie., incorrectly to the "article" in question above). The quote had been accurately attributed to an official State Dep't statement, along with a valid reference to the posting of that statement on the web.

Let me ask this: is it more useful to quote the State Department, the actual Field Artillery article, or both? Could you clarify what you mean by editorial paraphrase, and who is doing the paraphrasing? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 00:53, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Both. The quote itself is from the State Dep't. The State Dep't quote quotes the Field Artillery article (along with a hypertext link to the article itself). So it seems to me that to quote the State Dep't you also need to include their reference to their quote of Field Artillery.

In this case, you were editorially adding the useful information: "...in the official U.S. Army...". The usual way to indicate an editorial comment (which is not being quoted, but summarizing, clarifying, simplifying, or otherwise paraphrasing the actual quote itself) is by putting square brackets (ie., '[' and ']') around it.

--Wikiscient (talk) 01:12, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

With the same edit, you also commented out what seemed to me to be some valid and relevant text re. the "photographer" (though I did not contribute at all to that text myself). The photographer claimed that "he had seen people who are hurt by phosphorus shells." We are not told why he believes that they had been hurt by phosphorus shells. He could, for example, have seen them being struck by phosphorus shells -- something about which, as a photographer, whether he does or does not have sufficient medical training to identify WP burns, he would be qualifed to make the statement attributed to him. So I have uncommented that text.

--Wikiscient (talk) 00:42, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree absolutely. We are not told why he believes people were struck by phosphorus shells, or, more correctly, the products of their bursting. We are not told his name. We are not told his training. In other words, we have a quote from someone who either did not know, or did not relay, why he believed the photographer. You are speculating about what he "could have" seen. If we do not even have the reporter's reasons for recounting what the photographer told him he saw, I do not consider that a reputable source.

Okay, well that's different than the reason you gave for commenting it out. --Wikiscient (talk) 01:12, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Could you, perhaps, rephrase that information such that no one is speculating on what the photographer saw? Ideally, is there information that gives a WP:RS account of a direct injury confirmed to be by WP? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 00:53, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't know, is there? (This isn't really my field anyway: so, no clue ;). --Wikiscient (talk) 01:12, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I do not believe there is any such information, from this reporter/photographer. There is no question that WP was used, and I have no doubt that it injured or killed people. Nevertheless, I am seeing what appears to be a good deal of POV journalism. Had any of these journalists gotten an opinion from someone with demonstrable knowledge of trauma medicine or forensic pathology, I would treat it as much more reputable sourcing.

Unfortunately given the constraints of OR, I have seen WP injuries at close hand, as well as a wider range of severe burns. I also have some knowledge of the process and appearance of decomposition of human bodies, and did provide a citation, inside a comment, in one of the WP related articles. An Iraqi physician claimed the corpses were greenish-black, but that is not an uncommon color to any body decomposing in hot weather. If you like, I can provide citations to general pathology texts that describe this.

I would request that the reporter/photographer comments be deleted as not meeting the criteria of WP:RS. It would be one thing for a reporter to see that he had personally seen fire or bodies, but there seems only speculation to justify the unnamed photographer's opinion. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:46, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable as far as I'm concerned.

It sounds like the most useful search to do would have to be done by someone with access to MEDLINE®, etc...

(and, btw, I meant '[' and ']' used as text, not as "wiki markup" -- I don't know if that might have been confusing)

--Wikiscient (talk) 01:59, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm glad we seem to be coming to some sort of plan for consensus. MEDLINE is primarily a journal reference, rather than to textbooks. I think I can find some online references, but there is one issue. If you will take personal experience as a placeholder, there's going to be a bit of the classic difficulty of proving a negative. As a result of a freak laboratory accident -- a glass container containing WP exploding when a colleague hadn't fully pulled down the front of a fume hood, I saw WP, stuck in his arm and burning, at very close range. This was in the late seventies, so HAZMAT gear wasn't as at-hand as now, in the lab, ambulance, or ER. I got the area covered with wet cloth, which both cooled and cut off oxygen, stopping the burning, and then rode the ambulance to the ER, with containers for safely holding WP. As the physician pulled out a piece, it would burst into flame as it met the air, and go out when we got it into the can of water. Afterwards, the burns looked like any other partial and small full thickness burn -- there wasn't anything unique about them once the source of heat was removed.

A emergency physician friend, who had been in Iraq in 1991, and I watched the documentary. The corpses looked like dead bodies that had spent some time in desert heat, which accounted for the "melting" of the skin. The color was normal for a corpse under such conditions.

The only actual description I've seen in this article is a "green-black" color described by an Iraqi physician. Some of the links go to articles mixing references to WP and directed energy weapons. All I can say is that when WP landed on my colleague's skin and clothing, both burned -- there's been a lot of handwaving about WP burning skin but not clothing. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:50, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Wow. Interesting.

I don't have any problem commenting-out the "photographer" text for the reasons now stated above.

I still think that it would be useful for someone with access to MEDLINE®, PubMED, etc., to do a full search of the most up-to-date and widely published peer-reviewed professional literature. If there's nothing about it there, that would then be a very good reason to doubt some of the more extreme and controversial (counter-)claims being made about this issue.

--Wikiscient (talk) 03:07, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Still looking and haven't found images. Here is a case report: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3912/is_200201/ai_n9022610/pg_1 of a patient that had a WP burn, from an industrial accident, over 36% of body surface area. The immediate treatment was critical: covering with water and then debriding. An earlier treatment, flooding the area with cupric sulfate solution, did stop the reaction but created a more poisonous result. In this case, there's nothing unusual about the burn or sequelae after the WP was removed. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 03:03, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

MEDLINE

I'm trying to think of the best way to convey content, since abstracts aren't the best thing in the world at detail. Here is one recent review paper, however, that seems relevant, and is online: http://www.medbc.com/annals/review/vol_20/num_4/text/vol20n4p203.asp. The authors include the (Lebanese) Secretary General, Mediterranean Council for Burns and Fire Disasters (MBC), WHO Collaborating Centre, Division Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, American University of Beirut Medical Centre and an American burn specialist.

Title=MILITARY AND CIVILIAN BURN INJURIES DURING ARMED CONFLICTS Annals of Burns and Fire Disasters - vol. XX - n. 4 - December 2007 my emphasis

Phosphorus munitions will continue to burn until deprived of oxygen or totally consumed. As for any other chemical burn, the depth and severity of phosphorus burns are related to both the concentration of the agent and the duration of contact with the tissues. Dermal penetration with deep burns and tissue necrosis result from continued contact of the skin with phosphorus. Also, fragments of this metal may be driven into the soft tissues. However, most of the cutaneous injuries resulting from phosphorus burns are due to the ignition of clothing and are treated as conventional thermal injuries

The immediate treatment of an active WP burn involves depriving it of oxygen, typically by covering it with water; WP is normally stored under water in laboratory environments. The note about cutaneous injuries hardly seems as if WP has some strange ability to burn clothes without burning skin. Yet in White phosphorus use in Iraq#Second major assault on Fallujah, Washington Post reporters are saying WP can't be put out with water. Now, I would agree completely that burning magnesium and thermite can't be put out with water. In another WP-related article, Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre#Criticism "A subsequent documentary, Star Wars in Iraq by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta, accounts for human heads being burned, without their bodies, clothes and nearby equipment suffering damage by alleging the use of US experimental weapons."

If you go to the Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre webpage, it talks of showers of multicolored material -- yet WP is characteristically white.

Being burned by anything is ugly. I'd much rather be shot to death than burned to death, but there is no special evidence that WP burns are worse than a burn caused by any equivalent source of heat. The chemical weapon mustard (dichloroethyl sulfide) does cause internal and external chemical burns. While it's not a weapon, hydrofluoric acid burns are especially nasty, since there's no immediate sense of being burned -- there's little awareness until the damage is done.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:55, 21 February 2008 (UTC)