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THE SO-CALLED "BALKAN-SYNDROME": A BIO-ENGINEERING APPROACH

Dr Antonietta M. Gatti – Dr Stefano Montanari

Antonietta Morena Gatti is a physicist and bioengineer, and is the founder and the director of the Laboratory of Biomaterials of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy). She is the discoverer of the presence of micro- and nano-particles in biological tissues and of their pathological effects. The European Community appointed her Coordinator of the international group in charge of the nanopathology study.

Stefano Montanari is a pharmacist and a scientific consultant. He has collaborated with Dr Gatti for about 25 years.

It is a well-known fact, widely reported by media, that a non- negligible number of veterans of the Gulf War (1990-91) showed what according to medicine are mutually unrelated symptoms. Some of those can be attributed to stress: headache, for example, or sleep disturbance, or forgetfulness, or an impaired concentration. Other symptoms like fatigue, muscle and joint pain, and shortness of breath are somewhat harder to classify, but cancers, various and, in some cases, extremely unusual diseases of the genitourinary system, an increased incidence of birth defects among veterans' children and disorders of the blood and the haemopoietic organs must be due to causes that cannot be legitimately ascribed to stress. Other pathologies Gulf War veterans are suffering from, like sudden death and Lou Gehrig's disease are under investigation as to their meaningfulness. But the problem is unfortunately wider and not limited to that group of military population. Very similar symptoms are being displayed by soldiers who served in the former Yugoslavian territory during the so-called Balkan War, made worse by an unusually high incidence of Hodgkin's and non- Hodgkin's lymphomas. Staffers of humanitarian missions and Yugoslavian residents as well are suffering from the same diseases. Professor Edo Hasanbegovic, chief of the Paediatric Clinic of Sarajevo, denounced how leukaemia is on the increase in children throughout the Yugoslavian Federation, but mainly in children coming from Velika, Kladusa and Buzim, towns located close to the Croatian borderline. An explanation to all that was offered when in March 2000 NATO revealed that Depleted Uranium (DU) shells had been employed in the Balkans and in 2001 traces of radioactivity were detected by the United Nations Environment Protection agency not far from Sarajevo, in a barracks at Han Pijesak and in two places inside a factory in Hadzici. It is a frequently observed fact that radioactivity is a triggering factor to cancer, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki tought a painful lesson about that. So, uranium was immediately seen as the obvious scapegoat to blame. For a better understanding, it is necessary to know that DU was used to make a component of some shells used in that war, but radioactivity played no role in that choice. High density and hardness are the features that made those projectiles, called kinetic penetrators, particularly fit for piercing even very thick armours. DU is what is left over when most of the highly radioactive isotopes of uranium are removed for use as nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons. The DU used in armour-piercing munitions is also used in civilian industry, primarily as ballast, for stabilizers in airplanes and boats. As a matter of fact, uranium is a mixture of three isotopes: U235, U234, and U238. When the content of U235 is below 0.711%, uranium is classified as "depleted", and the blend used in the Balkans contained less than 0.2% of that isotope. DU is approximately 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium and emits alpha and beta particles, and gamma rays. Alpha particles can hardly pass through the skin, while beta particles are blocked by most garments, and the amount of gamma rays, a form of highly penetrating energy, emitted by DU is very low. The radioactivity produced by those weapons is certainly not healthy, but its full responsibility for such an unusual health situation looks at least doubtful if observed from a scientific standpoint. In addition to that, another piece of evidence is raising a further doubt about the radioactive origin of the pathologies: A higher-than- expected quantity of lymphomas and symptoms identical to those suffered from by the Balkan War's veterans was observed in Italian soldiers who had never served in any theatre of war nor had ever come near to radioactive weapons. The condition all those soldiers shared was serving in firing grounds. In the meantime, someone tried to blame the multiple vaccinations soldiers underwent during the so-called Operation Desert Storm, but without being able to give any scientific demonstration to that thesis. As a matter of fact, in addition to the usual vaccines against tetanus-diphtheria, hepatitis B, poliovirus, meningococcal, typhoid and yellow fever, the American troops were treated with Botulinum Pentavalent, unlicensed in the United States, intended to counteract botulism. Then they were treated with a vaccine against anthrax, a drug proven to be teratogenic. In fact, women receiving it are warned not to have children for at least three years. Finally troops received Pyridostigmine bromide, not a vaccine, but a pre-treatment against nerve agents. That drug, normally used for myasthenia gravis, is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a nerve gas antidote and its side effects are potentially very dangerous. But those medicines were administered to US troops only, while the Gulf War Syndrome affected also civilians and soldiers of other nationalities. Thus, no answer was given to the question: why do people living in theatres of war and soldiers working under particular conditions contract those diseases with such an alarming frequency? Our Laboratory of Biomaterials of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) is engaged in checking bioptic and autoptic samples coming from patients belonging in the classes described above. It is an indisputable fact that all samples contain inorganic micro- and nano-particles, while it may be interesting to observe that none of them show any trace of uranium. >From the technical point of view, those very small fragments can be detected by using an innovative technique of electronic microscopy we developed and that has been already described in iterature. What we found were very small bits, sometimes agglomerated, of simple or combined metals: Fe-Si, Cu-Cl-Zn, Si-Ti-Fe-Al, Si-Bi, Si- Pb, Fe-Cu-Zn, Cr-Fe-Ni, Fe-Mn and, but just once, Zr alone. The spherical shape, hollow in the larger sizes, of many particles proves their formation under a very high temperature, a condition compatible with that of the explosion of a DU shell. DU projectiles hit very different targets, but specially buildings and armaments like, for example, tanks, and when they do, the temperature in the core of the explosion exceeds 3,000°C, which is more than enough to have all solid matter sublime and, in some cases, form new metal alloys. That gas expands over a arge volume of atmosphere, then, rapidly, the matter becomes solid again taking the shape of very small spheres (down to 10-8 m diameter), stays suspended in the air and is carried away over distances depending on atmospheric conditions like wind, rain, snow and pressure. This phenomenon was studied in 1977-78 at the US Air Force base of Leglin (Fla). After some time, all the air-borne particles fall slowly down and settle on grass, vegetables, fruit or expanses of water where they become inevitably a guest of food and drink to animals and men alike. Even if that unwanted presence is known in advance – but very often it is utterly ignored - getting rid completely of inorganic particles can be very difficult. A good wash eliminates a great quantity of debris from fruit or vegetables, but cauliflowers, for example, cannot be cleaned thoroughly because of their rough surface, while those particles that settle in the tissues of animals that ate contaminated grass and men eat as meat can't be taken away at all. Keeping in mind the well-known, even if never widely publicized, phenomenon studied at Leglin and the new science of nano-pathology, an explanation to the unanswered question becomes easy. People present in firing grounds and in the theatres of war, and being a soldier or a civilian makes no difference, breathe in micro- and nano-particles while they are suspended in the air as an aerosol, then eat and drink them along with vegetables and water. We have amply demonstrated with our researches that once debris that size (10-9 – 10-5 m) enter the body, be it via the digestive or the respiratory system, they can easily negotiate the uminal tissues and either be captured by the tissue itself which acts the way a filter does, or be transported by the blood or the ymph until they end their travel in some organ (for instance the kidneys and the iver). Lymph nodes, for example, are the organs where ymphomas start and develop and where, in all pathological cases checked, we found the presence of inorganic particles. But also all the other pathologic specimens we had the possibility to observe show clearly and without any single exception the presence of debris. It is important to underline that none of the particles we found is biodegradable. Just to give a further confirmation about the applicability of the theory according to which the so-called Balkan Syndrome has an environmental, nanopathological origin, particles found in the diseased tissues of soldiers and civilians, and particles found in the ground of the territories where the pathologies were contracted are mutually compatible. If no uranium was ever detected, that does not necessarily mean there is none somewhere in the tissues of the patients. The fact is ikely to be due to its quantity, which is extremely scarce when compared with the huge masses of the targets that sublime and that contain no such element. It is also possible that uranium particles had been captured by tissues but, probably because they did not reach a critical threshold, did not trigger any disease and, as a consequence, we did not have the chance to receive and study the samples. In conclusion, DU's responsibility is only indirect, and it is not its radioactivity to blame, but the very high temperature that uranium produces once the shells of which it is a component hit the mark. It is then possible that the Balkan Syndrome has a multi-factorial origin including radioactivity and vaccinations, but the main cause is without any doubt a nanopathological one.

For further information about nanopathology www.biomat.unimo.it/eng/nanopat.htm

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