Originally published August 6 2005
Veterans' cancer link found
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A recent study states that an increased number of cancer deaths in Gulf War veterans may be caused by Sarin, a nerve agent.
For the first time, a study has found an increase in brain-cancer deaths among Gulf War veterans who might have been exposed to the nerve agent sarin by the destruction of Iraqi weapons in 1991.
About 100,000 of the 350,000 Army soldiers in the Persian Gulf could have been exposed to sarin after soldiers blew up two large ammunition caches in Khamisiyah, Iraq, in March 1991, according to a study commissioned by the military and performed by the Institute of Medicine.
At the time, the military didn't know that the destroyed Iraqi rockets contained sarin, says Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director for the Deployment Health Support Directorate in the Department of Defense.
The potential "hazard area," where shifting winds could have carried traces of chemicals, extended at times as far as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
According to the study, soldiers inside the hazard area were about twice as likely as those outside it to die from brain cancer.
Because the actual number of brain-cancer cases was small, the overall mortality rate was the same for veterans in the hazard area and outside the area, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Public Health.
"It's a doubling of risk, but it's still a pretty small risk," says Page, a senior program officer at the Institute of Medicine.
The study did not address "Gulf War syndrome," as some have called the collection of ailments experienced by returning veterans.
Page suggests that researchers follow veterans to see whether the risk of brain cancer, which is believed to develop over 10 to 20 years, changes over time.
Melissa Bondy, a professor of epidemiology at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, questions why only one or two days of exposure would increase brain-cancer mortality.
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