And don't forget the "harmless" dust in Iraq....
"Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have coined the term “Iraq-Afghanistan war lung injury” to describe respiratory symptoms developed by some veterans — and they have duplicated the problem in mice, using dust from Camp Victory in Baghdad.
In an article published Friday in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, researchers including Dr. Anthony Szema, an allergist and assistant professor of medicine at Stony Brook, found that exposing mice to dust collected from Camp Victory in 2007 produced inflammation and changes to respiratory airways similar to those found in Iraq veterans diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis.
The mice lungs contained “angular, sharp and solid” particles with traces of titanium and iron, according to the study.
Replicating the experiment with dust from other locations, including the San Joaquin Valley in California; Kandahar, Afghanistan; and a titanium mine in Montana, the researchers could not produce the same inflammatory response.
“Respirable Iraq dust leads to lung inflammation in mice similar to that seen in patients, with polarizable crystals, which seem to be titanium,” the study concludes, referring to several of Szema’s patients — veterans found to have titanium and iron in their lungs following tissue analysis.
A massive, Pentagon-funded population study called the Millennium Cohort Study found that 14 percent of troops who deployed to Iraq report experiencing chronic respiratory symptoms such as cough, bronchitis, shortness of breath and asthma starting during deployment or afterward, compared with 10 percent who did not deploy."
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