Can you help identify this image?
January 13th, 2010
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Recent a depleted uranium debunker sent me a link to this news story “Iraq: Depleted Uranium Babies.“ It’s not surprising to see yet another trumped up and unfounded news story about the supposed effects of depleted uranium, but this one stirs up one sore spot. There is a photo which is commonly used in claims about depleted uranium. Like many images, it’s not what it seems, but the source is still not known. In the past, other reputed photos of depleted uranium-enduced deformitives turned out to be taken in the US in the 1950’s, pulled from medical textbooks or from a museum in Bangkok.
The above image has been reported to show a child in Iraq after the US invasion. It’s also been claimed that it shows a child in Kosovo or Bosnia, in Afghanistan or a victim of the Chernobyl event from Ukraine or Belarus. These claims, however are false.
Perhaps you’ve seen this photo somewhere or can help trace it to its original source. Here is what we know:
What the image shows:
A woman, appearing to be a dark skinned Caucasian (perhaps Indian or Arab) holds an infant with a very apparent medical problem. The child has hydrocephalus, a condition seen in one in five hundred births, making it one of the most common birth defects. Hydrocephalus is a condition in which cerebral fluid does not properly drain from the skull, causing a fluid build up in and around the brain and resulting in swelling and potentially severe brain damage. Note that the child’s eyes also appear to be effected by the condition, one being closed and another severely off center. This is a common effect of the swelling and pressure.
However, there is some good news here. The child does appear to be receiving the kind of medical care he (or she) needs for this condition. Hydrocephalus is typically treated by implanting a cerebral shunt. This is simply a tube which allows the fluid to drain from the head, typically to the abdominal cavity. The tube may remain in place for many years and in young children, it’s typically placed in a manner to accommodate growth. The small sore in the child’s head is actually the point of the implant and the tube, or tubes can be seen running down the child’s body. Dramatic though this may look, the fact is that this infant actually is getting the medical care he (or she) needs).
The prognosis of this individual is impossible to know. Many born with bydrocephalus go on to live perfectly normal lives, but in other cases, the condition has already caused brain damage that will result in developmental disorders. Not knowing the severity of this infant’s condition, the age of the child or other factors, it’s impossible to tell whether or not he or she has suffered any significant brain damage or complications. All that can be said is that the individual is apparently receiving the proper treatment for this condition and therefore has at least a good chance of going on to live a normal life.
The head swelling can be expected to go down and the head will return to a more normal shape as the pressure is relieved. The fluid can’t be removed all at once or it could cause the skull to collapse. As the child’s bones are still soft and pliable, they can return to a more normal shape. As he (or she) grows, the tubes will be less obvious and eventually invisible. In the future, surgery may be required to replace the tubes to accommodate growth or they may eventually not be necessary at all.
There is one slightly unusual thing about the photo: the child appears to have not one but two tubes coming down from the head. This is not unheard of, but most surgery involves just one tube being placed. One doctor suggested to me that this could be because the surgeon was concerned that the child might not be able to quickly get medical attention in case one of the tubes clogged (as might be the case in a third world country.) A second tube would assure that a clog would not result in potentially dangerous fluid retention in the case of a clog or kink. This is just speculation, however. It’s also possible that the surgeon decided that more than one point for drainage was necessary.
It’s very hard to tell if the child also suffers from malnutrition, as the age of the child is not known. It would not be unusual for an infant with this condition to not be resistant to feeding, although this should resolve with the treatment. The bottom line is that the child has a good chance of recovery, likely as good as in any developed country and that this is not some weird disease but rather a common birth defect seen all over the world and which can be caused by any number of factors, but often occurring for no known reason.
and yes, I have run this by a couple of doctors. They tell me it looks like a textbook case.
The style of dress of the woman in the picture appears to be Western. She may be a relief worker, a nurse or possibly (although it seems less probable) the child’s mother. The background, including the blanket do not appear consistent with hospitals in the United States or Western Europe. It may be Russian, Eastern European or Middle Eastern. The style of clothing implies this photo is no older than the 1980’s. The fact that the woman is wearing a sweater implies that it is not a very hot area of the globe.
The history of the image:
The image first showed up on the internet sometime around the mid 1990’s. It is often found with a number of other photographs under the title “extreme deformities” and has been attributed to Siegwart Horst Günther, an anti-nuclear and anti-depleted uranium acitivist of dubious credibility. It is often claimed to have been taken in Iraq, although this is not universal to all the sites that use it. In other cases it’s been used on its own or with a variety of other images claiming it to be depleted uranium-related. Many of the pages which use the image actually pre-date the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the attacks of 9/11 and even the administration of George W. Bush, such as this one, which has a history going back to at least early 2001.
Metadata on some pages along with time stamps on the files and internet cache searches have shown that the image was online by at latest 1996. This site claims that this photo was taken by Gunther between 1993 and 1995. That may be an accurate date for the image, although where it was taken and whether Gunther actually took the picture at all can’t be validated.
The File:
There are actually two different scans of this image which can be found on different early pages that host the image. One is slightly larger in resolution and size, but is cropped and the other is slightly reduced in size but shows a bit more of the image on the left side. It appears the the original dimensions were 509 by 373 pixels and 496 by 331 pixels in jpeg format.
One of the most important clues can be found in the file itself. Many examples of the photo have been resized or re-encoded, but the earliest known examples of both versions indicate that they were created in Adobe Photo shop version 4.0. Version 4.0 of Photoshop was released in 1996, and was superseded by version by version 5.0 in 1998, 5.5 in 1999 and 6.0 in 2000. It is of course possible that the whomever scanned the image did not upgrade to the next version of Photoshop right away, but it seems unlikely that the software would still be in common use by 1999 to 2000, as newer versions introduced vast improvements.
The fact that the photo was created in Photoshop does not imply that it was altered or edited. It may simply be that Photoshop was the program used to acquire the image from a scanner. The exact size of the photo is unknown, as early scans indicate that the resolution was 360×360 pixels for the wide version and 400×400 for the cropped version. However, these resolutions would result in an image of only about one inch in height. It is therefore likely that it was resized and the embedded resolution is not accurate.
The Source of the Image:
Exactly where the image came from is unknown, but a close examination of the image reveals some minor pattern speckling within the image. This would seem to indicate that the image was scanned from printed material, such as a magazine, a text book or a color illustrated book. It was probably NOT acquired directly from a photographic print or from camera negatives. It also clearly was not captured from video, a news paper or a digital source.
(Of course, at the time of this photo, digital photography was in its relative infancy and was used in only a few limited circumstances and at a low resolution and quality.)
Whether or not the photo was taken by Gunther can’t be proven or disproven given the avaliable data, however the fact that it was not scanned from an original photographic print or camera negative would lend weight to the hypothesis that it was not.
Possible sources include: A textbook, a news magazine, a book of some other type, promotional materials for a group such as Doctors without Borders or another relief group.
Conclusions:
- The image appears to have been first scanned in 1996. The original image may have been taken up to a few years before that. It is likely from the early 1990’s.
- It is possible that the image was taken in Iraq, but the claim that it was taken in Afghanistan can be rejected outright, because at the time the country was almost completely closed to outsiders
- Any claim that it was taken in recent years or that it shows the results of the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan are without doubt false
- The infant in the photo is receiving proper treatment for a common medical condition
- While it cannot be conclusively shown that the claim that Siegwart Horst Günther took the picture, it is just as likely, if not more so that it came from a publication of some type.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Depleted Cranium, Enviornment, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 13th, 2010 at 6:26 pm
The background contains two features that indicate to me some sort of office/clinic setting. There appears to be a bench seat along a wall with a back rest/ bolster attached to the wall. The wall looks somewhat like the vinyl fabric coated panels used in commercial offices.
Robert
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January 13th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
It seems to me that the picture might be from this book, but it wasn’t published until 2000.
http://www.ahriman.com/en/guenther.htm
I found the book on amazon.de and translated the page:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.amazon.de/Uran-Geschosse-Schwergesch%25C3%25A4digte-mi%25C3%259Fgebildete-Neugeborene-sterbende/dp/3894848057/ref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1263421167%26sr%3D8-1&sl=de&tl=en
It is interesting to note that modern M1A1 tanks also use DU in their armor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams#Armor
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January 13th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Yeah, but the color scheme just doesn’t seem right to me for a western hospital or clinic. That’s clearly not a hospital-issued blanket. That kind of use of green in medical settings and the walls really makes me think of Russian institutional settings or maybe even central asia like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan.
If you consider the time period: early 1990’s was when the Soviet Union had just fallen, Russia was in shambles and a lot of outsiders were suddenly seeing the ugly side that the Soviets had managed to keep hidden. It makes me wonder if that might be a good candidate-somewhere in the former Soviet Union, where there might be news stories or something in a magazine.
I can’t prove anything, but my guess is that someone found this image while thumbing through a magazines or something looking for an image that looked sad and tragic.
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January 13th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Well, you’ve debunked most of the claims about the image, but it may very well be legitimately taken in Iraq. If it was, that means nothing. There are hydrocephalus births in Iraq just like every other country. No connection to anything.
If you can find it I think your best bet would be international medical relief organizations: Doctors without Borders, Unicef, the WHO and any other charities or organizations that might be involved in clinics in areas that are lacking.
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January 14th, 2010 at 1:40 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
That’s just it, irregardless of where the image comes from, it is categorically not evidence of depleted uranium contamination, not at any level.
However the double shunt is a clue. The eldest of my sisters is an intensive care pediatric nurse with about 30years under her belt. I e-mailed her the photo on the off chance she had seen it before and could give us an idea where it might have come from. She could not but made this observation from what she has read on the condition.
It seems that hydrocephalus caused by infections of the CNS are the most common form of this condition in Africa. Treatment is compounded by the fact that delivering medical care in that region is difficult, and the shunts in these types of cases often fail, (~40%) requiring a second operation, and this cannot always be done in time, nor is follow-up always available. Therefore apparently it is the practice in some clinics to double shunt the patient right away to increase the chances of a successful outcome. This was made possible by the development of an inexpensive shunt developed in Zimbabwe (of all places) costing much less than the $35USD standard ones on the market.
So we may be looking at a photo related to this. She promised to flash the picture around also to see if anyone else remembers it, but the above is her best guess.
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January 14th, 2010 at 1:47 am
Yeah, that was something similar to what I had heard. If a shunt fails somewhere like the US or Canada or the UK or whatever, the patient will be taken to a hospital to have it corrected. That is not going to be the case everywhere. If it’s a little village in Pakistan or Congo, then it’s not like they can get them to help right away.
That infant is not African though. WAY too pale for that. Also, I doubt you’d see that kind of clothing in Africa, except for perhaps the highlands.
My best guess on this is that it might be Eastern Europe, the Balkans or possible central Asia – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and so on. It’s possible it’s Pakistan or the highlands of India.
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January 14th, 2010 at 1:53 am
drbuzz0 said:
On the other hand there is a large number of Indian ex-pats living in Africa… But I suspect your right and the photo is probably Eurasian in origin.
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January 14th, 2010 at 10:27 am
DV8, there is no such word as irregardless unless you are in middle management.
I have nothing else to add. Normally I just ignore spelling errors on this page (otherwise buzz0 would keep me way too busy to get any real work done :–) but that one is just wrong AND ugly.
It’s worth noting that the original article (http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=80e260b3839daf2084fdeb0965ad31ab), to which this one now links, does not include this image. Of course there’s still plenty of nonsense in the text alone…
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January 14th, 2010 at 11:15 am
[Other] Matthew said:
I see by the dictionary you are right, the word does not have general acceptance, Thank-you for pointing that out. This is is one of those English words that I would never have guessed was inappropriate on my own, as my spell-check accepted it and I have seen it used elsewhere. I shall cease using it at once.
French of course goes to great lengths, (at times ridiculous lengths) to protect its ‘purity’ while English seems to welcome new words with indifference. However there are occasions when some word or usage seems to rub a large majority of Anglophones the wrong way, like in this case, and acceptance is just not forthcoming.
Learn something new every day.
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January 14th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Not to completely derail your search, but I think that’s most people are annoyed by the fact that the prefix and suffix contradict each other.
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January 14th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Its use makes readers (or listeners) imagine the PHB from Dilbert, and you just don’t deserve that.
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January 14th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Chris Blalock said:
uh, what?
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January 14th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
DV82XL said:
English goes much farther than that:
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January 14th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
DV82XL said:
You can only go so far with that. Languages evolve, and even if you manage to keep words and phrases out of the officially recognized dictionaries, slang can’t really be controlled and it can proliferate even if you don’t recognize it. I suppose the French speakers of the world could slow it down, but never really stop it completely.
I know people now who say things like “OMG” and “LOL” out loud, like not written, but spoken. Seriously, I hear it more and more often.
I tried replying by saying “Semicolon, hyphen, closed parenthesis” and they didn’t seem to understand.
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January 14th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
drbuzz0 said:
L’Académie française, or the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu and consists of forty members, known as les immortels (the immortals) The body has the task of acting as an official authority on the french tongue and it is charged with publishing the official dictionary of the language. Although now its rulings are only advisory and not binding on either the public or the government, they still have a great deal of influence on how the language is written and spoken, at least in educated circles.
However you are right that so-called ‘cosmopolitan’ French (meaning any French not spoken in Paris) is rife with borrowed terms and variant grammar. The French spoken on the streets in Quebec is full of English for example, but nevertheless one would not use such language in a formal report or a presentation to clients.
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January 15th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
*sheepish*
I actually am still using an older version. Fortunately, I do still have one computer capable of actually running it, though now that Apple has gone Intel, I will eventually need to bite the bullet and actually buy a new copy.
*chuckles* On my G4 laptop, it actually complains that I have inadequate resources. Must have at least a 68040 with a floating-point processor!
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January 15th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
drbuzz0 said:
On my favorite TV show, “The Big Bang Theory”, Sheldon says he was happy by saying, “In the world of emoticons, I was colon capital D.”. Then they explain to him that he wasn’t detecting paradigm shifting magnetic monopoles, but static from them turning the electric can opener on and off and Raj says, “He just went colon capital O.”. Later in the show they do a joke based on Einstein’s Cosmological Constant.
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January 15th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
[Other] Matthew said:
Good catch! Also note that there is no caption and no mention of the picture in the article. So in the strictest sense the picture says nothing about anything.
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