According to the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, titanium and other metals have been found in the lungs of at least six sick Iraq veterans, metals found in dust samples from Camp Victory in Iraq.
“We biopsied several patients and found titanium in every single one of them,” said Anthony Szema, a pulmonary and allergy specialist at New York’s Stony Brook School of Medicine. “It matched dust that we have collected from Camp Victory.”
Stars and Stripes said that Szema will present a report at the Symposium on Lung Health after Deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan detailing his findings, which show that the Iraqi dust is different from other dust in that the human body is incapable of eliminating it.
Normal pollutants enter the lungs and, in most cases, the body eliminates them through a variety of processes. The Iraqi dust contains copper and iron in addition to titanium. The particles are tiny and sharp-edged, each about 1/30th the diameter of a human hair. They lodge in the lungs’ tiniest airways, the bronchioles, and form crystals that ultimately destroy the air passages.
The resulting syndrome is called constrictive bronchiolitis, and it can be caused by the inhalation of a number of environmental toxins. Damage to the lungs can be permanent and, in some cases, fatal.