07.05
As if the fighting wasn’t bad enough. From Wired Magazine:
U.S. Troops Face New Threat: Afghanistan’s Toxic Sand
By Spencer Ackerman
June 28, 2010U.S. troops already face plenty of threats in Afghanistan: AK-47–wielding insurgents, improvised bombs, an intransigent and incompetent government. Now add a less familiar challenge to that list of woes: Afghanistan’s toxic sand.
The pulverized turf, it turns out, contains high levels of manganese, silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, chromium and other metals that act as neurotoxic agents when ingested. Combine the country’s frequent sandstorms and the kicked-up dust that results from helicopter travel with troops’ nostrils, mouths and pores, and you’ve got an unexpected example of how inhospitable the terrain is for the soon-to-be 98,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines fighting the war.
That’s all according to new research presented this month to a neurotoxicology conference in Oregon by a senior scientist with the Navy Environmental Health Effects Laboratory. That scientist, Palur G. Gunasekar, tells Politics Daily’s Sheila Kaplan that “the sand extract dose increases at the higher concentration you see cell death.” As the late Ronnie James Dio told us time and again, metal is evil. . .
Yep – Metal is evil. I’ve known that for years, after all I was a tooling engineer and before that worked in a steel mill. No surprise but most of the tooling I had to deal with was made of metal. Even worse we were trying to use that tooling to make plastic parts — and plastic — I could tell stories.
As far as sand goes, (and we needed to sand blast tooling to clean it), if you read the Material Safety Data Sheet, (MSDS) for sand, you will run away crying in terror. I am so happy I survived it all and I hope the American troops do even better. Somehow most people in Afghanistan have managed.