Burn Pits Linked to Chronic Cough and Wheezing in Veterans, New Study Shows – By Patricia Kime (Military.com) / Sept 14 2020
A new report from a scientific advisory panel finds some evidence that chronic respiratory symptoms, such as coughing and wheezing, are linked to service in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and post-9/11 combat environments such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the research, published Friday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, found there was not enough evidence or data to conclude a link between combat deployments to the Middle East and Afghanistan and many serious pulmonary diseases — a finding likely to disappoint thousands of service members who believe their poor health was caused by open-air burn pits used by the U.S. military for waste disposal or by the dust or emissions inhaled while they served overseas.
The Department of Veterans Affairs asked the National Academies in 2018 to review existing scientific and medical research to determine whether such deployments contributed to the development of respiratory illnesses in U.S. service members.
An 11-member panel led by Dr. Mark Utell, professor of medicine and environmental medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, could not definitively prove any association between deployment and more than 20 health conditions, including non-cancerous respiratory disorders such as sinusitis, sleep apnea, constrictive bronchiolitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as cancers of the lungs, esophagus, mouth and nasal passages.
Continue to article: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/09/14/burn-pits-linked-chronic-cough-and-wheezing-veterans-new-study-shows.html
