7/10/97

Sam Hendrix, 844-3698 (hendrj1@vetmed.auburn.edu)

AU VETERINARIAN STUDYING EFFECTS OF GULF WAR ON MILITARY DOGS

AUBURN -- A veterinary neuropathologist at Auburn University is analyzing muscle and nerve tissues from U.S. military dogs that served in the Gulf War. The anticipated two-year effort is aimed at helping to determine any adverse health effects that may have resulted from their presence in the Persian Gulf Theater.

Dr. Kyle Braund, a professor in the AU College of Veterinary Medicine and director of the spontaneous neuromuscular diseases program and diagnostic laboratory in Auburn's Scott-Ritchey Research Center, is conducting the tests.

"Every week we receive a box of tissues," says Braund. "At the end, we hope to provide the Air Force with enough information that they can understand any environmental effects of the Gulf War on the dogs sent to work there. If changes are found, chemical weapons is one possibility, but the dogs' nerves can degenerate from a lot of things in that environment: oil, gas, explosions, burning oil wells and other things."

A special emphasis, Braund said, will be on conditions correlating to the major complaints of the Persian Gulf veterans, including neurologic disease, orthopedic disease, dermatologic disease and psycho-physical conditions relative to memory and attention span.

Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, which contracted with Braund for the study, supplied 118 German shepherds to accompany personnel in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. These highly specialized patrol dogs and other working dogs were used in security and counter-terrorism.

"These dogs were mature and well-trained, on average seven years of age when they were sent to the Gulf," Braund said. "It's been five years since they returned, and because their life expectancy is 12 to 13 years, several have died and the rest will likely die of natural causes in the next two years or so."

Braund, who visited Lackland to meet with Air Force officials and view the dogs' kennels, said that to his knowledge, no dogs were destroyed to simply to speed up the testing.

"As far as I can tell, they were very well cared for at the Air Force Base," he said.

Braund has analyzed nerve samples from 40 dogs sent from Lackland so far, and he expects to study tissues of up to 250 other dogs in the next two years. The study will include similarly aged dogs not exposed to the Gulf War Theater. He will report his results to the Air Force, but even the AU scientist won't know which dogs served in the Gulf War since it is a blind study.

"That means the biopsy samples sent to us are not labeled as to

whether that animal actually went to the Gulf War," Braund said. "There

is only one person at the Air Force Base who will know exactly which

samples are from dogs that went to the war."

Braund says the secretive method protects the integrity of the test from any bias on either end and allows the Air Force to know the results before anyone else.

Braund's connection with the dogs is limited to minuscule nerve fibers individually teased from peripheral nerves. He will view these under a microscope, searching for abnormalities and tears in the fibers. Any changes he observes in nerves are quantified and tabulated.

Braund says the type of German shepherds sent to the Gulf War are subject to age-related conditions such as degenerative myopathy. This is a disorder of the spinal cord, and while it usually affects only the spinal cord, it can also involve peripheral nerves, so he must consider the potential of this condition along with other normal age-related nerve

degeneration that may be present. Other metabolic conditions such as

hypothyroidism also need to be discounted.

"Because of their ages, some of these dogs will have 10 to 15 percent of their nerve fibers deteriorated, anyway," he says. "Besides, a degenerating nerve looks the same whether it's caused by nerve gas or old age."

Braund adds that when changes in the military dogs' nerves exceed the normal aging percentage, "we feel comfortable that we are dealing with peripheral nerve disease."

Braund, on the AU faculty since 1974, is internationally recognized for his work in neuromuscular diseases. His lab in the Scott-Ritchey Center receives upwards of 500 biopsy samples every year from throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. These samples usually represent cases that have baffled other veterinarians and specialists in those areas.

"Ours is the only veterinary facility in the world to focus on nerves and muscle disease, and because we have our fingers on the global pulse of new diseases, we can often determine whether a condition springing up in the same breed in, for example, Belgium and Birmingham is an inherited disease or one caused by external factors," Braund said.

Braund and his laboratory associates have diagnosed and published scientific articles on more than two dozen neuromuscular diseases in varying breeds of dogs and cats worldwide during the 1990s.

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july97:AU-gulfdogs

CONTACT: Braund, 844-