Study: Antibiotics Don't Help Sick Vets

[Rose Siding]

PHILADELPHIA -- A year on powerful antibiotics did nothing to relieve the chronic health problems reported by Gulf War veterans, demolishing the theory that so-called Gulf War syndrome is caused by a bacterial infection, researchers say.

The bacterial-infection theory "is off the table at this point," said Joseph F. Collins, a VA Maryland Healthcare System researcher and one of the study's authors. "It's disappointing, but the results are definitive: This is not the smoking gun."

The study was done by the Department of Veterans Affairs and was published Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers have found that veterans of the Persian Gulf war in 1990 and 1991 are more likely to suffer from a range of chronic symptoms, including memory and thinking problems, debilitating fatigue, severe muscle and joint pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia, headaches and rashes. However, the cause has proved elusive.

Theories include stress, bacterial infection, chemical or biological weapons, pollutants from burning oil fields, depleted-uranium munitions, and vaccinations for anthrax and other potential biological weapons.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-sick-vets,0,3849809.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

[benddem]

1. can't wait to see

what this war brings. This is dreadful. These guys are also going to have life long problems

[PaDUer]

4. Just think of what that blowing sand

does to their lungs and those high temps, amongst other things..These guys won't ever be the same.

[schultzee]

2. Depleted Uranium is the cause. I listened to Hillary in Senate hearings

about it. They are doing their level best to keep it under cover because that is how they are using nuclear waste by making weapons out of it and it is killing our soldiers. They are doing terrible things to the people they send to war.

[arikara]

3. Dr. Helen Caldicott talked about that years ago

and explained how harmful depleted uranium is. Of course they called her a crackpot.

[Boomer]

5. Not to mention...

...all the terrible things it does to the people who happen to live on the battlefield. The soldiers, at least, get to leave.

[uptown ruler]

6. its just going to get worse...

we shot literal tons of depleted uranium during the first two gulf wars, and now we are building bases there. ummm yeah...its going to get worse...


Spreading The Word

[TeeYiYi]

7. Here's a NEW and interesting article on depleted uranium:

Depleted Uranium:
The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
LEUREN MORET / World Affairs – The Journal of International Issues 1jul04

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.

LEUREN MORET

Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium — from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India — to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. . .

<snip>

The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.

Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government’s own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Much more: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm

TYY

On Edit: Add two more paragraphs.

[shanti]

8. this really makes me sad....

:cry: and it's "our own country" that is doing it!!!

[TeeYiYi]

9. Yeah. I know. :( ...n/t

TYY:kick:

[Massacure]

10. If I recall, depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium

However, it is a heavy metal and has a large amount of chemical toxins that often are thrown around as dust after it hits its target. This effect is similar to that of other non-radioactive heavy metals such as lead.

[TeeYiYi]

11. . . .

"After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout."

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm

TYY

[Massacure]

12. DU isn't going to kill off humanity

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/sci/A0861723.html
http://interactive.usask.ca/ski/mining/search/mineral_types/energy/uranium/descrip.html

It is only 60% as radioactive as natural uranium, and natural uranium is the 48th most abundant element on Earth. There is about 500 times as much uranium as gold, 40 times as much as silver, and twice as much as tin.

You eat and drink uranium all the time. People have eaten and drank it for thousands of years.