VETS BATTLE MYSTERY SICKNESS

A pointer to this Reuters arti­cle landed in my in-​​box with the sub­ject “Gulf War II Syndrome?” That’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle pre­ma­ture. But this is weird, weird stuff, nonetheless.

An unex­pect­edly high num­ber of U.S. sol­diers injured in the Middle East and Afghanistan are test­ing pos­i­tive for a rare, hard-​​to-​​treat blood infec­tion in mil­i­tary hos­pi­tals, Army doc­tors reported on Thursday.
A total of 102 sol­diers were found to be infected with the bac­te­ria Acinetobacter bau­man­nii. The infec­tions occurred among sol­diers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and three other sites between Jan. 1, 2002, and Aug. 31, 2004.
Although it was not known where the sol­diers con­tracted the infec­tions, the Army said the recent surge high­lighted a need to improve infec­tion con­trol in mil­i­tary hos­pi­tals.
Eighty-​​five of the blood­stream infec­tions occurred among sol­diers serv­ing in Iraq, the area around Kuwait and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army said in a report pub­lished on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Military hos­pi­tals typ­i­cally see about one case per year.

If there is a Gulf War II syn­drome, it may have the same roots as the mys­tery ill­ness that struck the vet­er­ans of Gulf War I: depleted ura­nium, or D.U. That’s the ultra-​​hard, appar­ently toxic mate­r­ial American forces have been using for years in their anti-​​tank shells.
Vanity Fair chron­i­cles how sol­diers who have been exposed to the stuff in Iraq have been com­ing back in bad, bad shape.

At first, Terry merely had the usual headaches, body pain, ooz­ing rash, and other symp­toms. But later he began to suf­fer from another symp­tom which afflicts some of those exposed to D.U.: burn­ing semen. “If he leaked a lit­tle lubri­ca­tion from his penis, it would feel like sun­burn on your skin… In England, Malcolm Hooper, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of med­i­c­i­nal chem­istry at the University of Sunderland, is aware of 4,000 such cases. He hypoth­e­sizes that the pres­ence of D.U. may be asso­ci­ated with the trans­for­ma­tion of semen into a caus­tic alkali.
“It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forc­ing it through barbed wire,” Riordon says. “It seemed to burn through con­doms; if he got any on his thighs or his tes­ti­cles, he was in hell.” In a last, des­per­ate attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, “I used to fill con­doms with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubri­cant.” That, she says, made her pain just about bear­able. Perhaps inevitably, he became impo­tent. “And that was like our last lit­tle inti­macy gone.“
By late 1995, Terry was seri­ously dete­ri­o­rat­ing. Susan shows me her journal-​​she titled it “The Twilight Zone”-and his med­ical record. It makes har­row­ing read­ing. He lost his fine motor con­trol to the point where he could not but­ton his shirt or zip his fly. While walk­ing, he would fall with­out warn­ing. At night, he shook so vio­lently that the bed would move across the floor. He became unpre­dictably vio­lent: one ter­ri­ble day in 1997 he attacked their 16-​​year-​​old son and started chok­ing him. By the time armed police arrived to pull him off, the boy’s bot­tom lip had turned blue. After such rages, he would fall into a deep sleep for as long as 24 hours, and awake with no mem­ory of what had hap­pened…
Even after he died, on April 29, 1999, Terry’s Canadian doc­tors remained unable to explain his ill­ness. “This patient has a his­tory [of] ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ with mul­ti­ple motor, sen­sory and emo­tional prob­lems,” the autopsy report by pathol­o­gist Dr. B. Jollymore, of Yarmouth, begins. “During exten­sive inves­ti­ga­tion, no defin­i­tive diag­no­sis has been deter­mined.… Essentially it appears that this gen­tle­man remains an enigma in death as he was in life.” 

The arti­cle never quite gets around to what D.U. expo­sure really does to a man. Is it burn­ing semen? Bone can­cer? Psychotic breaks? Lung prob­lems? All of the above? But the amount of sto­ries and stud­ies accu­mu­lated leads to only one con­clu­sion: that D.U. is some­how linked to a whole bunch of sol­diers get­ting sick. And the Pentagon doesn’t seem to be in any par­tic­u­lar hurry to fig­ure out why.
THERE’S MORE: D.U. was also used exten­sively in Bosnia and Kosovo, Mike Davis points out. And there seems to be “no dif­fer­ence in the symp­toms of those infected in the Balkans as those in Iraq from the first Persian Gulf War.” But the Pentagon isn’t impressed. This 2001 study says there’s no link between D.U. and leukemia.
For a his­tory of sol­diers com­ing home sick, Defense Tech pal Ryan Singel rec­om­mends The Wages of War: When America’s Soldiers Came Home.

November 21st, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.