Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Studies on the health of military working dogs are in their infancy. One epidemiologist
privately expressed frustration about how little had been done. That is changing. A major
study is under way on military working dogs deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and early
results may be out by late 2014. Military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq may
have been exposed to environmental toxins. Sandstorms there are dramatic and last for days.
The dust particles are inhaled. Burn pits that the military has used to get rid of everything
from human waste to metals have created exposure to smoke that concerns veterans' groups.
If service people were exposed, so were the military dogs working alongside them.
Michael Peterson, an epidemiologist and veterinarian in charge of the study for the Vet-
erans Health Administration's post-deployment health group, said that the reason for study-
ing the dogs is “99.9 percent human.” Peterson and a VA colleague, physician Wendi Dick,
whose specialty is preventative medicine, are focusing on respiratory diseases first and fore-
most, but also on cancer, neurologic diseases, and neoplasms.
Peterson, Dick, and their fellow researchers are looking at medical records for a group
of 450 military dogs deployed overseas from 2004 to 2007: Malinois, German shepherds,
Dutch shepherds, and Labradors. They will be compared with a control group, dogs who
were destined to deploy but stayed behind in the Military Working Dog Center at Lackland
Airforce Base.
If the military dogs died or were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, the researchers have their
tissue samples. Necropsies used to be routine for even healthy military working dogs, since
they were standardly euthanized rather than being adopted out. That has changed since
Robby's Law passed in 2000. Now military working dogs can return from overseas, be adop-
ted, and get lost as a medical subject. It's hard, except in the abstract, to regret that change
too much. Then there are dogs who were part of the contractor system and may have de-
ployed for years at security points and embassies; there are dogs who, like Kathy Holbert's
dog, searched for missing soldiers. Those health histories are inevitably lost or incomplete as
well.
“We're really just testing a hypothesis. We don't know what we're going to find,” Peterson
said. “We're keeping the categories very, very broad. This may be a dead end. We may stumble
across something. This is just another piece of the puzzle.”
• • •
Dogs get sick, get old, die. Certain dogs you miss more than others. You try not to, but inev-
itably, that's what happens.
Kathy Holbert's cadaver dog, Strega, was eleven when she was diagnosed with bile duct
cancer. She had been over in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a year. She became ill and died
within a couple of months in the mountains of West Virginia, where she'd spent most of her
