By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News Staff

THE controversial research conducted by University of Guam research scientist Dr. Luis Szyfres continues to spark debate in the local research community and has drawn the attention of veterans who were stationed on island many years ago.
The U.S. Blue Navy, a national veterans organization, has posted on its Web site, www.bluewaternavy.org, Szyfres’s report linking toxic chemicals to various diseases on Guam. The Web site is devoted to research, opinions and court cases relating to chemical warfare contamination in areas occupied by U.S. forces.  The Szyfres report has also been circulated among national research groups via e-mail.
“Many veterans are having their cases held up for service-connected illnesses. I believe there is plenty of information to support their cases for service connections. Many of these veterans and family members are sick with a host of diseases. Cancer, heart disease and diabetes seem to be the most prevalent,” said veteran Reuben Van Sanderson, who has been doing research on Agent Orange and other chemical weapons used by the military during the Vietnam War and World War II.
“Most (ill veterans) are from the Vietnam era. The older veterans seem to be having problems with neurodegenerative diseases, the ones from World War II. But one thing stands out and that is many vets are sick and looking for answers,” Van Sanderson stated in an e-mail to Szyfres.
Szyfres attributes the various diseases on Guam, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Lytico-Bodig, to the high concentrations of toxic metals in Guam soil, air and groundwater. Most of the contamination, according to Szyfres, was the result of toxic chemicals left by the military and pollution produced by Ordot Dump.
UOG officials, however, dispute Szyfres’s research, citing studies that they say found no evidence that link metals to Guam diseases.
John Paul Rossie, a retired Navy who was ported on Guam twice in 1969, said Szyfres’s report “is causing quite a stir among the Blue Water Navy veterans because their exposure to dioxins during the Vietnam War has, until the last 90 days, been denied by the Department of Veteran Administration for compensation and, in some cases, treatment.”
He said the report will be used in both individual and group claims and appeals to the Veteran’s Administration asking for the treatment of Agent Orange-related illnesses.
Szyfres said the complexity of toxic chemical contamination problem on Guam was due to “dispersion factors such as evaporation, rain, infiltration, winds, the mechanisms of human exposure, but most of all, because of the government’s censorship and cover up.”
“At this point, I have examined more than 2,000 documents and obtained evidence of the contamination of our food, water, plants, etc. Even though they blocked every attempt I made to study the frequency and distribution of the toxic chemicals in the human population, their presence in the brain of our people speaks for itself,” Szyfres said.
Szyfres said his 150-page preliminary report was based on 516 documents containing previous studies, including those conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
However, research scientists from UOG’s Water and Energy Research Institute dispute Szyfres’s theory.
“For the last 20 years that I have been on Guam, this is the first time that I heard such news that the chemicals are killing the people of Guam,” WERI scientist  Dr. Shahram Khosrowpanah stated in an e-mail to UOG Philosophy professor Dr. James Sellman, who supports Szyfres’s research.
“There has not been any indication of the chemical levels to be exceeding the safe drinking water standard in our drinking water as Dr. Szyfres claims to be,” Khosrowpanah said.
Dr. Gary Denton, another scientist at WERI, said that for 10 years, the waters in Guam wells and drinking water system are monitored quarterly by the Guam Waterworks Authority for all pollutants listed under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“There have been a few instances where levels of a particular contaminant have exceeded (only just) the highly conservative (USEPA) maximum contaminant levels established for potable waters, but well over 99.9 percent of all samples analyzed over the past decade are good to go,” Denton stated in an e-mail to Sellman.
“From a chemical standpoint, the water is actually pretty good and, for what it’s worth, I drink it.  I’d be far more concerned about the infiltration of disease causing organisms from sewage overflows and leaky sewer pipes coupled with inadequate chlorination.  The risks to human health associated with this are far greater in my opinion,” Denton said.
In a May 2006 report on a study conducted in waters surrounding Ordot Dump such as Lonfit River and Pago Bay,  WERI cited errors in early metal data, which institute researchers ascribe to “poor sampling and/or inappropriate analytical techniques.”
“As a consequence much of data collected prior to the early ‘90s is of limited value or of no value at all, at least for certain critical elements like cadmium, lead, mercury and silver,” the report said.
WERI said research found the Lonfit-Pago river system “is in remarkably good shape considering that it has been inundated by vast quantities of metal enriched leachate over the past half-century or more.”
“Climatic and topographic characteristics of the area have effectively conspired to produce natural cleansing processes that periodically scour the watershed of heavy metal contaminants and transport them out to sea,” the report stated.
“Climatic disturbance also prevents the long-term accumulation of contaminants in the Pago Bay area despite some seasonal deposition of lead and zinc in the estuary during the milder wet season conditions and chronic, low-level inputs of lead, mercury and zinc from septic systems at the northern end of the bay,” WERI said.