A SENATOR has demanded that the US Navy hand over documents that could reveal
if a link exists between a military fuel and a cluster of 14 childhood leukaemia
cases near a naval airbase in Nevada.
Concerns about health risks have mounted since the fuel, called JP-8, was
introduced to American airbases in the 1990s after trials in Britain in the
1980s. Animal tests have shown that it can cause lung, kidney and liver damage,
and is highly toxic to the immune system. The Pentagon has even commissioned
studies to determine whether JP-8 exposure contributed to Gulf War syndrome.
Now Harry Reid, a senator for Nevada, has filed formal requests to the Navy,
the federal Office of Pipeline Safety and pipeline company Kinder Morgan to
disclose records related to JP-8 leaks and spills around the airbase in Fallon,
Nevada. “When we talk about causes of the leukaemia cluster, jet fuel is the
number one thing mentioned,” says Reid.
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JP-8 consists of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons, including polyaromatic
hydrocarbons (PAHs) and benzene, a known carcinogen. Its low freezing point
means it can be used in all climates. The Pentagon sees JP-8 as a “universal
battlefield fuel” for NATO, capable of powering trucks, tanks and even infantry
stoves as well as planes.
But military personnel and people living near airbases can be exposed to a
superfine mist, or aerosol, of unburnt JP-8 produced as a plane’s engines warm
up before and during takeoff. In breath tests for PAHs, all airbase personnel
studied have tested positive for JP-8 exposure. Animal studies have shown that
inhaling JP-8 increases lung permeability and can damage the DNA of lung and
liver cells—and thus potentially cause cancer
(91av, 28 March 1998, p 6).
Recent research has also shown that it is extremely toxic to the immune
system. Mark Witten, a toxicologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, whose
work is funded by the US Air Force, was astounded by what JP-8 does to mice that
inhale it. “It’s just wrecking their immune systems,” he says. “I’ve never seen
a chemical that can so completely wipe out an animal’s defences.”
Part of the problem with JP-8 is that it doesn’t readily evaporate, so it’s
more likely to soak into the skin and lungs. What’s more, there’s some evidence
that the performance-enhancing additives in the fuel disrupt the molecular
arrangement of the outermost layer of skin, poking holes in the body’s main
barrier against alien chemicals.
Even after brief exposure, the number of immune T cells in mice plummet and
their thymus (where immune cells mature) shrinks, while B cells proliferate. So
severe and sustained are the effects that Witten and his colleague David Harris,
also at the University of Arizona, worry that repeated exposure could increase
the risk of autoimmune diseases and cancer, especially in the presence of other
risk factors such as pesticides.
Witten is now studying whether JP-8 causes breaks in DNA strands in the
animals’ bone marrow cells, potentially triggering leukaemia. It’s already known
that the children of parents who are exposed to hydrocarbons at work have a
greater risk of developing acute lymphoblastic leukaemia—the type of
childhood leukaemia in 13 of the 14 confirmed cases in Fallon. “My nightmare
scenario is that there are fifty other clusters like Fallon out there,” says
Witten.
The effects of exposure to aerosols and spills on children and pregnant women
have yet to be studied. But when pregnant mice are exposed, Harris recently
discovered, up to 70 per cent of offspring die and surviving pups have abnormal
white blood cells.
The US Navy vigorously denies that JP-8 poses any risk. But leukaemia experts
such as Peter Domer of the University of Chicago agree that Witten’s concerns
are well founded. Hydrocarbons in JP-8 such as naphthalene or benzene are
capable of causing the sorts of genetic damage seen in childhood leukaemia,
Domer says.
