◆ SpookStack

ay AS ' THE PENTAGON'S TOXIC oe Fair Article Page 3 of 10 one of her ancestors. Her father retired from the Marine Corps as a captain in the early 1960s, then worked as a quality- control director for NASA)s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Asa's reverence for the military borders on idolatry. "My father taught me ever since I can remember to have respect for anyone who serves in the military, because they protect us. They're willing to take bullets for us." It was patriotism that motivated Asa to approach the Pentagon in 1994 about vaccines administered to the troops for Operation Desert Storm. By then, the symptoms related to Gulf War syndrome had been widely publicized. They were vague enough to point to anything from a stroke to allergies to mere tension. "But when these particular symptoms are taken together,” Asa says, "they point to autoimmune disease"-- when a person's immune system goes haywire and attacks his or her own body. Mostly, doctors don't know what causes autoimmune disease. Many victims develop it from unknown causes. Since 1984, Asa had been working with her husband, Kevin an M_D. certified in both internal medicine and rheumatology to treat a group of women with such autoimmune diseases as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. After a series of landmark legal cases in the early 1990s which alleged a relationship between silicone breast implants and autoimmune disease (the lawsuits put the main manufacturer, Dow Corning, into bankruptcy), a large number of the Asas’ patients revealed that they had received breast implants. Pam Asa became convinced that silicone had induced diseases such - as scleroderma and lupus in her patients-a conclusion that embroiled her in one of the most contentious public-health disputes of the 90s. It is a view that has propelled her into what promises to be an even more bellicose scrap. Asa suspected that the autoimmune illnesses showing up in Gulf War troops were also induced by a toxic substance. For one thing, the gender breakdown of the victims was suspicious. Women develop autoimmune diseases far more often than men do. With lupus the ratio of female to male sufferers can be as great as 14 to 1. But among Gulf War veterans the victims were overwhelmingly male (an anomaly only partially explained by the Fact that women made up a mere 6.8 percent of the U.S. force serving there). Another startling fact pointed to the vaccination program. Many of Asa's Gulf War-syndrome patients had never deployed to the Persian Gulf. They had never been exposed to petroleum fires, chemical-weapons fallout, pesticides, or the other suspected causes of Gulf War syndrome. But, she says, they did have one thing in common with the troops who were in theater: they had rolled up their sleeves and gotten their shots. For Asa, all of this pointed to an adjuvant. Adjuvants are toxic substances which make vaccines more effective by stimulating an even stronger response from the immune system than a virus or bacterium. might on its own. In the course of investigating the possible connection between her earlier patients’ breast implants and their illnesses, Asa says she came across a confidential Dow Corning document showing that the company had. conducted research with silicone as a vaccine adjuvant in 1974. The term "adjuvant" comes from the Latin word adjuvare, "to aid." Hut the quest for a safe, effective adjuvant has been like the medieval chemist'’s quest to turn lead into gold. Adjuvants work because they are toxic, generally too toxic. Eighty years of research has produced a grand total of one that is considered safe for human use: a salt called aluminum hydroxide, also known as alum. Other adjuvants have been rejected as too dangerous; in tests on animals, adjuvants have been used over and over again to induce autoimmune disease. At first, Asa suspected sabotage. "If the vaccine manufacturers were overseas, their loyalties could lie elsewhere or be bought for the right price.” If an enemy wanted to undermine our fighting forces undetected, she says, this would be one way to do it. "T can't think of a more effective and insidious way to reduce the effectiveness of a military force going into combat. This disease process affects people's minds. Patients suffer mood swings, blackouts, and cognitive disorders where a person loses the ability to read or understand language or remember directions. This is not what you want to see happening to people who handle guns, bullets, and bombs." Asa contends this "process" can develop into Full-blown, debilitating, and sometimes fatal autoimmune diseases such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. In June 1994, Asa phoned Colonel John Dertzbaugh of the Pentagon's Defense Science Board with her theory. Dertzbaugh., said it made a lot of sense, and promised to check it out. But the Science Board had just completed a report concluding that there was "no persuasive evidence" of Gulf War syndrome and no single cause of illness related to service in the Persian hitp://www.idir-net/~krogers/vantyfair.html 11/8/2005