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A SIMPLE way to diagnose organophosphate poisoning in Gulf War veterans and
farmers may be just around the corner, claims a US scientist.

Mohamed Abou-Donia of Duke University Medical Center in Durham has found
antibodies to nerve proteins in the blood of a 5-year-old boy exposed to the OP
pesticide chlorpyrifos. The antibodies indicate damage to the nervous system
consistent with OP poisoning.

Groups campaigning for the British and US authorities to acknowledge the
illness caused by OPs have seized on the development as a possible way of
identifying affected people. “This is a significant breakthrough,” says
Elizabeth Sigmund of Britain’s OP Information Network. Abou-Donia told New
Scientist: “If these biomarkers are validated…they would have very
useful applications for identifying OP-exposed individuals both in the developed
and developing world.”

Abou-Donia has several other controlled studies ready for publication which
also suggest that exposed people make antibodies against nerve proteins. He’s
going to need this extra evidence, says OP researcher David Ray of Leicester
University, who advises the British government’s Veterinary Products Committee.
Ray says the child’s symptoms, initially diarrhoea and rashes, followed by
spasticity, also fit illnesses other than OP poisoning, and he doubts whether
the child was exposed to enough chlorpyrifos to cause such serious symptoms. But
if current tests on sick Gulf veterans by Abou-Donia again reveal these
biomarkers, Ray concedes, antibodies could in theory be a “pretty good system”
for identifying OP illness.