THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 14, 1997 TAG: 9701140232
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 51 lines
Scientists see at least one positive side effect in all the studies on Gulf War disease - long-needed attention to possible dangers in the way chemicals interact in people.
While thousands of ailing veterans have a direct interest in the research into exposure in the Gulf War, ``the whole issue of mixtures urgently needs attention,'' said Dr. Philip Landrigan, community medicine chief at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center. ``It's not new, but it's inadequately explored.''
As a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, Landrigan closely studied research into whether the combination of medicine and pesticides used by soldiers in the gulf had negative combined effects.
The committee said in its final report that it could find no ``causal link'' between these substances and the range of ailments suffered by many veterans, including insomnia, nausea, diarrhea, joint and muscle pain, and chronic fatigue. But it encouraged more research.
Landrigan said work done more than a decade ago by the National Academy of Sciences found knowledge in this area woefully lacking.
``Only 25 percent of single chemicals had ever been tested at all,'' Landrigan said. ``The (knowledge of) combined effects is minuscule. Toxicologists have known about this gap.''
``There has really not been much study in the area of interaction of chemicals, unfortunately, and that's one of the reasons we wanted to look into it,'' said Dr. Thomas Kurt, one of the University of Texas Southwestern researchers who worked on the Gulf War project.
The issue of how combined chemicals affect humans is far more complicated than simply mixing two substances in a beaker and testing it on laboratory rats.
In one example cited by Kurt, a person might be exposed to multiple substances that are all metabolized in the same organ. With that organ fully occupied, one of those substances might migrate to be metabolized in a way that might result in visible symptoms.
``It's like getting a lot of weightlifters down the same hallway - the stuff starts to back up,'' Kurt said.
The field of combined effects is not unexplored. Cancer researchers, for example, have studied the connection between mouth cancer and alcohol and tobacco.
Each separately creates a greater risk. ``But there is an astonishingly higher risk for the combination,'' said Dr. Samuel Shapiro, head of the Slone Epidemiology Unit at the Boston University school of medicine.
KEYWORDS: PERSIAN GULF WAR CHEMICAL GULF WAR SYNDROME