PurpleheartOklahoma (scroll down)

Toxins in war zone dust linked to ailments
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-05-11-Iraq-Afghanistan-dust-soldiers-illnesses_n.htm
May 12, 2011  By Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

 U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait
have inhaled microscopic dust particles
laden with toxic metals, bacteria and fungi
— a toxic stew that may explain everything
from the undiagnosed Gulf War Syndrome
symptoms lingering from the 1991 war
against Iraq to high rates of respiratory,
neurological and heart ailments
encountered in the current wars, scientists
say.
 "From my research and that of others, I
really think this may be the smoking gun,"
says Navy Capt. Mark Lyles, chair of medical
sciences and biotechnology at the Center for
Naval Warfare Studies at the Naval War
College in Newport, R.I. "It fits everything —
symptoms, timing, everything."

Lyles and other researchers found that dust
particles — up to 1,000 of which can sit on
the head of a pin — gathered in Iraq and
Kuwait contain 37 metals, including a
luminum, lead, manganese, strontium and
tin. The metals have been linked to
neurological disorders, cancer, respiratory
ailments, depression and heart disease,
according to the Environmental Protection
Agency. Researchers believe the metals
occur both naturally and as a byproduct of

 pollution.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-05-11-Iraq-Afghanistan-dust-soldiers-illnesses_n.htm#

Researcher: Windborne
dust more dangerous
Until about a decade ago, scientists believed that any pathogen living in desert dust would be killed if it made its way into the daylight.

But emerging research questions whether that is true, as well as how wind-bornedust might spread disease.

William Sprigg , a science professor at Chapman University in California and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona , works with medical researchers to try to understand how dust interacts with human cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms, as well as how dust may spread disease. He uses NASA satellites to predict dust storms and where they might travel so susceptible populations — such as people with asthma or heart problems — can be warned. He advises the New Mexico and Arizona state health departments about his predictions.

Researchers have found previously that Saharan dust storms may spread meningitis through central Africa, he says, and Americans get “valley fever” every year from a fungus that may spread through airborne dust.

Sprigg first looked at dust from Africa 10 years ago.

“I was shocked,” he says. “The current wisdom is that any bacteria or virus that might be alive, after it hits the air, it’s exposed to ultraviolet radiation and killed.”

But weather systems pick up the particles, protecting them from ultraviolet radiation with clouds, outside layers of yet more bacteria, and the sun-blocking dust itself.

“I think it can fly for hundreds of miles and not contact sunlight,” he says.

He’s also looked samples found in air above the Atlantic Ocean and found that some of the bacteria could cause ear infections and mouth lesions. And researchers have identified 213 viruses and 201 species of fungi in African dust. That dust has traveled as far as Florida, says Dale Griffin , an environmental public health microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Griffin said dust blowing through the Caribbean islands from Africa may have caused more cases of asthma in children on Caribbean islands — the asthma rate in Barbados is 17 times greater than it was in 1973.

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued guidelines for particulate matter in the past, but the organization focused on industrial pollution, rather than the possibility that naturally occurring dust could cause a problem, Sprigg says.

He said more research funding needs to go toward researching disease and dust, as well as to predicting dust storms and letting people know when they should stay inside.

“We need to encourage measurement,” he says. “We need to determine what is in it. We need to forecast it.”