Environment Adds to Challenges Facing Desert Shield Physicians

Abstract

HOSTILE WEAPONS aren't the only threat to the forces arrayed against Iraq in this fateful first month of 1991. For nearly 6 months, US military physicians, dental personnel, nurses, and corpsmen have been applying preventive and therapeutic measures against more than a score of potential environmental illness or injury threats. The fact that none of these threats has put any appreciable number of US military people out of action, physicians say, is a tribute to the unit commanders' and the troops' understanding of and compliance with primary preventive measures. Richard A. Mayo, MD, a US Navy captain who commands Fleet Hospital 5 somewhere in Saudi Arabia, attributes this in large part to today's "well educated, well disciplined" all-volunteer US military forces. Both James A. Zimble, MD, the vice admiral who is surgeon general of the US Navy, and Frank F. Ledford, Jr, MD, the lieutenant general who is surgeon general