Strategies to Protect the Health of Deployed U.S. Forces. Analytical Framework for Assessing Risks

The goal of this paper is to recommend to the Department of Defense DoD a preventive research strategy for deployed U.S. forces to prevent future illness from toxicological interactions from potentially harmful agents. By doing so, it is implicit that potential health risks exist in deployments because of possible exposures to multiple chemicals, drugs, and biologics under stressful environmental and occupational conditions similar to those in the Persian Gulf War. This conclusion was reached based on the authors knowledge of toxicological interactions among chemicals and other agents and his assessment of the available literature a variable even though any and all such risk predictions are by definition made in time. From this recognition it was concluded that something that is basically flawed cannot be fixed. Therefore, a new risk assessment paradigm that includes time as a variable of toxicity, is being suggested. it is clear that although dose is a simple function number of molecules, time is a complex variable, which runs on many different scales, at least three of which are interacting with dose to provide the complexity that seems to have bewildered generations of toxicologists. The three time scales are the toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic half-lives and the frequency of exposure. Thus, there are three liminal conditions.