Military service may be connected to ALS

[Lorainemarie]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061111/ap_on_he_me/military_lou_gehrig_s

Military service may be connected to ALS
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
1 hour, 34 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Military service, particularly in the Gulf War, may be linked to development of Lou Gehrig's disease, the Institute of Medicine said Friday. The evidence, however, is limited and inconsistent, the Institute said.

The degenerative nerve disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, gradually destroys the ability to control movement. Patients lose their ability to move or speak, but their minds remain unaffected. Most victims die of respiratory failure within a few years.

According to the report, released as Veterans Day was being observed, five studies have been done on the subject.

Three indicated a higher rate of ALS among veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War, one found a link to veterans who served prior to that war and one found no link at all.

"The evidence base to answer the question of whether military service increases a person's chances of developing ALS later in life is rather sparse, so we could not reach more definitive conclusions at this time," said Richard T. Johnson, chair of the committee that wrote the report.

"Because ALS occurs so rarely, any individual veteran's chances of developing the disease are still low," he added. ALS affects between 20,000 and 30,000 Americans.

Johnson is a professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University school of medicine in Baltimore.

The individual studies had been previously reported, and the Department of Veterans Affairs asked the Institute to review what was known and provide a new overview. The Institute of Medicine is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent research organization chartered by Congress to provide scientific advice to the government.

"The secretary will convene senior VA medical experts to study this report and make recommendations to the department," VA spokeswoman Lisette Mondello said Friday.

She noted that the department has a national registry of veterans with ALS also assist researchers studying the disease.

In 2001, then secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony J. Principi ordered that disability compensation be made available to veterans who served in the Gulf War in 1990-1991, who later developed ALS. Such compensation is not available to other veterans.

In its analysis, the Institute said three studies indicated the chance of developing ALS as much as doubles for Gulf War veterans. Another study concluded that veterans who served prior to that war had 1.5 times the rate of the non-veteran population for ALS.

But some of those studies may have understated the number of ALS cases among non-veterans, and the Institute said others were less useful because of limitations in the methods they used.

A fifth study found no relationship between military service and ALS.

Overall, the Institute concluded, "There is limited and suggestive evidence of an association between military service and later development of ALS."

The report called for more research to confirm this relationship and to determine the cause of any increased risk — which it said could include chemicals, involvement in traumatic events, intensive physical activity or other substances or activities.

Officials of veterans organizations could not immediately be reached for comment on the report.

ALS got the name Lou Gehrig's disease from the famed New York Yankees baseball player who died from it. Another well-known victim is English physicist Stephen Hawking, author of "A Brief History of Time." Hawking uses a wheelchair and communicates using a computer and voice synthesizer.

Between 5 percent and 10 percent of ALS cases are thought to be inherited; the causes of the rest remain unknown.

___

On the Net:

Institute of Medicine: http://www.iom.edu (http://www.iom.edu)

Department of Veterans Affairs: http://www.va.gov

[BobbyB]

Agent Orange exposure tied to ills in Vietnam vets
Thu Nov 9, 2006 3:49 PM GMT


NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Vietnam veterans who sprayed the herbicides like Agent Orange decades ago in Vietnam are at an increased risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and chronic breathing problems, a new study shows.

Agent Orange, a weed killer containing dioxin, was widely used during the Vietnam War, Dr. Han K. Kang of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC and colleagues note in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Overall, two thirds of the herbicides used during the conflict contained dioxin.

To understand the long-term effects of exposure to the chemicals, Kang and his team compared 1,499 members of the US Army Chemical Corps to 1,428 vets who had worked in chemical operations jobs but did not serve in Vietnam. The Chemical Corps members had been responsible for spraying herbicide around base camp perimeters, as well as aerial spraying of the chemicals from helicopters.

Study participants were surveyed by telephone in 1999 and 2000.



Tests of a subset of the study participants, including 795 Vietnam vets and 102 non-Vietnam vets, showed the Vietnam vets had higher levels of dioxin in their blood.

The researchers analyzed the effects of Vietnam service and herbicide exposure separately, and found that hepatitis was the only health problem linked to serving in Vietnam per se.

However, exposure to herbicides among Vietnam veterans conferred a 50 percent increased risk of diabetes, a 52 percent greater heart disease risk, a 32 percent increased risk of hypertension and a 60 percent greater likelihood of having a chronic respiratory problem such as emphysema or asthma.

An increased cancer risk also was seen among the Chemical Corps members, but this was not significant from a statistical standpoint.

"Almost three decades after Vietnam service," the researchers conclude, "US Army veterans who were occupationally exposed to phenoxyherbicide in Vietnam experienced significantly higher risks of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and non-malignant lung diseases than other veterans who were not exposed to herbicides."

SOURCE: American Journal of Industrial Medicine, November 2006.


© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved. | Learn more about Reuters

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=healthNews&storyID=2006-11-09T154923Z_01_COL956126_RTRIDST_0_HEALTH-AGENT-ORANGE-DC.XML&WTmodLoc=SciHealth-C4-Health-3

[Matuboo]

My comments are not needed or wanted here, my mistake. One I certainly won't make again.

[olsen]

Genetic variations in three enzymes that detoxify insecticides and nerve gas agents as well as metabolize cholesterol-lowering statin drugs may be a risk factor for developing sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease), and possibly responsible for a reported twofold increased risk of ALS in Gulf War veterans.

These findings, from a study led Teepu Siddique, M.D., and colleagues at Northwestern University, open the door to investigating gene-environment interactions as a cause of ALS and other illnesses and to the development of molecular targets for specific treatments. The study was published in the August 22 online issue (available now) of the journal Neurology.

Siddique is Les Turner ALS Foundation/Herbert C. Wenske Professor, Davee Department of Neurology and Clinical Neurosciences, professor of cell and molecular biology and director of the Neuromuscular Disorders Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

ALS is a complex neurodegenerative disorder of the motor neurons that results in muscle weakness, difficulty speaking, swallowing and breathing and eventual total paralysis and death generally within five years.

In 1993 Siddique and collaborators determined that mutations in a gene known as SOD1 account for 20 percent of familial, or inherited, ALS (2 percent of all cases of ALS). However, the cause of sporadic ALS is still unknown.

In earlier research Siddique and other researchers hypothesized that sporadic ALS is modulated by variations in multiple genes interacting with each other and environmental exposures.

The genes for human paraoxanases (PON 1, PON 2 and PON 3), which are located on chromosome 7q21.3, code for the production of detoxifying enzymes involved in the metabolism of a variety of drugs, organophosphate insecticides, such as parathion, diazinon and chlorpyrifos, and nerve gas agents such as sarin.

Previous research described a possible twofold increased risk for developing ALS in veterans of the Gulf War, indicating a war-related environmental exposure to organophosphates and sarin in genetically susceptible individuals as a possible cause. PON gene cluster variants have previously been associated with other neurodegenerative and vascular disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, coronary artery disease and stroke.

Although the Northwestern DNA study samples were not analyzed for inclusion of Gulf War veterans, Siddique and co-researchers found significant evidence that gene variations (polymorphisms) on the chromosome region encompassing PON2-PON3 were strongly associated with sporadic ALS.

"Thus, single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping in the intergenic regions of the PON gene cluster, and replication, gene expression, gene-gene interaction and PON serum/enzymatic studies may help elucidate the complexity of PON cluster association with ALS," Siddique said.

Siddique hopes to study DNA samples from Gulf War veterans with increased incidence of sporadic ALS and has applied for their DNA from the Veterans Administration collection.

Source : Northwestern University

[Meg1]

I hate to read stories like this in the popular press because the headline attracts so much attention and few people bother to read what the article says and fewer still really process the information. There's absolutely nothing new in this article--no new studies were conducted and this isn't even a report of a meta-analysis of previous studies. It's not even news. What does "Military Service May be Connected to ALS" even mean? The article might as well be titled, "Military Service may NOT be Connected to ALS." That, after all, is the conclusion of the article.

My own suspicion is that these studies probably underestimate ALS in the non-military population (it's much easier to follow veterans than civilians over a long period of time because veterans have a stronger incentive to make sure that government/veteran medical authorities can contact them) and that the studies do not properly control for the physical fitness of the comparison subjects (ALS is more common in the physically fit and any study that doesn't restrict the control group to men who would otherwise qualify for military service will have skewed results). But who knows?

At any rate, we certainly don't learn anything from reading articles such as this one.

[Matuboo]

.................

[lisag]

Well I'll comment on this one as well .. my husband was in the United States Air Force at the the time of diagnosis...and has participated in several of the studies both in regards to the "Gulf War" and in regards to the military population as a whole..
I can tell you this if you were in the Gulf War and you developed ALS you are entitled to receive service connected compensation..( now my thinking is the gov't is not paying out this money because they feel there is not a connection out of the generosity of their hearts)...
There is the second issue now being pursued that "all military " members may be at higher risk regardless of Gulf War service or not...
Also as ALS is rare in populations under 45...it was the age of the Gulf War vets that caught peoples attention...allthough true it does occur in younger populations in the civilian world as well...not nearly at the rate of the military population...
There is a database attempting to track all vets with ALS...if you are not in the database please join it..Lisa
http://www.va.gov/durham/alsregistry.asp

Edited further to add...yes, the VA studies are still currently ongoing ...they are not closed as it pertains to the military population on the whole ..indeed they are very active in research for vets....

[Meg1]

Well I'll comment on this one as well .. my husband was in the United States Air Force at the the time of diagnosis...and has participated in several of the studies both in regards to the "Gulf War" and in regards to the the military..
I can tell you this if you were in the Gulf War and you and developed ALS you are entitled to receive service connected compensation..( now my thinking is the gov't is not paying out this money because they feel there is not a connection out of the generosity of their hearts)...
Also as ALS is rare in populations under 40...it was the age of the vets that caught peoples arrention...all though true it does occur in younger populations in the civilian world as weel...not nearly at the rate of the military population...
There is a database attempting to track all vets with ALS...if you are not in the database please join it..Lisa
http://www.va.gov/durham/alsregistry.asp


...and that's exactly my point. If you're a servicemember with ALS the govenment knows about you and researchers can identify you because the government has made it profitable for you to notify them of your condition. If you're Joe Civilian with ALS, there is no such incentive.

[lisag]

Meg..my husband would have made a heck of alot more money as computer scientist than any compensation the gov't provided... and he'd live in poverty to get his health back...it wasn't that much either ...but I don't think they were just being kind ...
And there are efforts to track John Doe as well..in fact partially due to the efforts of a civilian database a link was discovered to military service and ALS to begin with...
Hopefully the VA's collaborations will also help "John Doe" as well ultimately ...as some exposures to substances maybe similar to those of the civilian population..some of the same genes in regards to a genetic predisposition may also come into play...and lead to a potential therapy...beneficial to all with ALS..
My husbands DNA has been banked by the gov't...Lisa

[lisag]

Are you in this database...my husband is..check to see if your physician is a participant by clicking on the links below and doing a search by your physicians name......if your physician is not a participant you can register yourself...

Also note the quote from this civilian database...
For example,” Miller notes, “the finding that 35 percent of ALS patients in the program were veterans was a big surprise and led to a whole series of studies about the risk of ALS in veterans of military service, which have been very fruitful.”




ALS Registries Yield Data, Research Leads
Do people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) who are treated at large medical centers with specialty clinics fare better than those treated by community physicians?

That’s one of many questions that investigators are attempting to answer by analyzing data gathered in the ALS CARE (Clinical Assessment, Research and Education) database www.outcomes-umassmed.org funded by a grant from the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, and the ALS Connection registry www.ALSconnection.org funded by MDA.

Neurologist Robert Miller, who directs the MDA/ALS Center at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, chairs the advisory board for the paper-based ALS CARE registry, which is designed to gather statistics on patients treated at major medical centers, and has an MDA grant to oversee the Web-based ALS Connection www.ALSconnection.org, which is designed to assess ALS care practices outside major centers.

ALS CARE, launched in 1996, now has data from more than 6,000 ALS patients.

“We have learned a lot about what treatments patients are using, whether the treatments were useful, and also whether the evidence-based guidelines approved by the American Academy of Neurology are being followed,” Miller says.

Unexpected research leads have also been generated from ALS CARE.

“For example,” Miller notes, “the finding that 35 percent of ALS patients in the program were veterans was a big surprise and led to a whole series of studies about the risk of ALS in veterans of military service, which have been very fruitful.”

ALS Connection began collecting data in January and now has almost 200 patients. Individual patients can’t be identified from either registry.

Miller encourages patients attending MDA clinics or ALS centers to register with ALS CARE, for which a physician’s participation is needed; and patients being cared for primarily by community-based physicians to register online with the ALS Connection.

“This is a chance for all persons with ALS to participate in research that will lead to an improved standard of care,” he says

[BobbyB]

Bush Admin. Gives Vets the Shaft

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted November 14, 2006.



A growing number of ill-prepared and under-funded clinics are tasked with caring for our nation's vets, and Bush is turning a blind eye. Tools
"War is ****," Union General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said 14 years after the end of the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. "It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation."

Clearly the U.S. Civil War is not on the reading list of psychiatrist Sally Satel, a scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Indeed, Satel sees war less as **** than as a golden opportunity for veteran lay-abouts to milk the government by " overpathologizing the psychic pain of war."

Satel, whom the AEI trots out anytime the Bush administration needs cover for cutting veteran services and benefits, says the problem for former soldiers is not Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). "The real trouble for vets," she writes, is that "once a patient receives a monthly check based on his psychiatric diagnosis, his motivation to hold a job wanes." Her solution? "Don't offer disability benefits too quickly."

The commentary makes an interesting contrast to a powerful piece in the October 2006 issue of the California Nurses Association's magazine Registered Nurse titled "The Battle at Home" by Caitlin Fischer and Diana Reiss. They found that "in veterans' hospitals across the country -- and in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded psych and primary care clinics as well -- Registered Nurses ... are treating soldiers ... and picking up the pieces of a tattered army."

According to the authors, RNs across the country "have witnessed the guilt, rage, emotional numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq and Afghanistan," as well as older vets from previous wars, "whose half-century-old trauma have been 'triggered' by the images of Iraq."

How many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually fall victim to PTSD is not clear, although a U.S. Defense Department study in 2006 found that one in six returnees suffer from depression or stress disorders, and 35 percent have sought counseling for emotional difficulties. The Veterans Administration (VA) treated 20,638 Iraq vets for PTSD in just the first quarter of 2006 and is currently processing a backlog of 400,000 cases.

Out of 700,000 soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf War, 118,000 are suffering from chronic fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, joint pains, anxiety, memory loss, and balance problems, and 40 percent receive disability pay. Gulf vets are also twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and between two and three times more likely to have children with birth defects.

The Ills of War

Modern battlefields are toxic nightmares, filled with depleted uranium ammunition, exotic explosives, and deadly cluster bomblets. The soldiers are shot up with experimental vaccines that can have dangerous side effects from additives like squalene. In short, soldiers are not only under fire, they are assaulted by their own weapons systems and medical procedures.

Satel need have no worries about the VA rushing to hand out cash to veteran couch potatoes. According to Fischer and Reiss, "A returning vet must wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits. An appeal can take up to three years."

Reserve and National Guard troops -- who make up between 40 and 50 percent of the frontline troops in Iraq and Afghanistan -- have a particular problem, because their military medical insurance benefits only cover conditions diagnosed in the first 100 days. PTSD sometimes takes years, even decades to kick in.

When they do complain, vets can expect that their ailments will be dismissed or their cause stonewalled.

When Gulf War vets complained about the symptoms which have come to be called "Gulf War Syndrome," the Pentagon told them it was in their heads, in spite of studies by the British Medical Journal and the U.S. Center for Disease Control that showed the returnees were suffering illnesses at 12 times the rate of non-Gulf vets.

For five years after the Gulf War the Pentagon denied that any troops had been exposed to chemical weapons. It took pressure from veterans' organizations and Sen. Donald Riegle (D-MI) to get the Pentagon to admit finally that as many as 130,000 troops (the vets say the number is higher) were exposed to chemical weapons from the destruction of the Iraqi arms depot at Khamisiyah.

Veteran organizations are currently fighting the Pentagon over its refusal to screen returning soldiers for mild brain injuries. Figures indicate that up to 10 percent of the troops suffer from concussions during their tours, a figure that rises to 20 percent for those in the front lines. Research shows that concussions can cause memory loss, headaches, sleep disturbances, and behavior problems. The Pentagon, arguing that the long-term effect of brain injuries needs more research, is unwilling to fund a screening program.

Given the wide use of roadside bombs, "Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of the war on terrorism," George Zitnay, co-founder of the Brain Injury Center, told USA Today. And according to researchers at Harvard and Colombia, the cost of treating those brain injuries will be $14 billion over the next 20 years.

In Iraq

Upwards of 20,000 Americans have been wounded in Iraq, some of those so grotesquely that medicine has invented a new term to describe them -- polytrauma. An estimated 7,000 vets have severe brain and spinal injuries, and have required amputations. For the blind, brain damaged, and paralyzed, war is indeed ****.

Calculating the cost of war is tricky, but Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently calculated that the price tag for the long-term health care for Iraq War vets will exceed $2 trillion.

But the **** we bring home is only a pale reflection of the **** we leave behind.

According to a recent estimate by the British medical journal, The Lancet, upwards of 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. Most of the country's infrastructure -- already damaged in the first Gulf War or degraded by a decade of sanctions -- has essentially collapsed.

Iraq's experience is not unique.

The Vietnam War ended more than 30 years ago, but according to the recent book, Vietnam: A Natural History, Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians are still dying from it.

From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped over 14 million tons of bombs on those three countries, including 90 million cluster munitions on tiny Laos alone. Somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of those fiendish devices never exploded, and, according to the British Mines Advisory Group, they have killed or maimed 12,000 Laotians since the end of the war. They continue to extract a yearly toll of 100 to 200 people, many of them children.

Traces of the 20 million gallons of Agent White, Agent Blue, and Agent Orange herbicides that the United States sprayed over Vietnam still poison the water, soil, vegetation, animals, and people of Southeast Asia, producing cancer and birth defect rates among the highest in the world.

So war is indeed **** -- for those who fight it, those caught in the middle of it, and those who eventually pick up the pieces.



Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

[lisag]

( originally posted by Dan on TDF's advocacy forum)


November 14, 2006

Roberta Friedman, Ph.D., Research Department Information Coordinator
Pat Wildman, Director Communications and Public Policy

[Quick Summary: A new report from experts convened by the Institute of Medicine agrees with prior conclusions that U.S. military veterans appear to have increased risk of developing ALS. The report recommends additional research to further assess the relationship between ALS and military service and determine what factors of military service may cause the disease.]

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has issued a new report from experts supporting an association between military service and later development of ALS. Published reports reviewed by the experts show up to a two fold increased risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) among veterans deployed in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Veterans from other eras, dating from World War II to post Vietnam, also appear to be at greater risk of developing ALS.

“A diverse panel of experts was able to conclude that existing evidence supports the increased risk for veterans,” said Lucie Bruijn, Ph.D., science director and vice president of The ALS Association. “We intend to continue our efforts to help veterans and to continue to search for the cause and effective treatment of ALS.”

The ALS Association has worked with Congress and the Administration to increase funding for ALS research, including research seeking to determine why veterans are at greater risk of the disease. When the first studies were published that found a link between ALS and service in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, The Association strongly supported former Secretary Anthony Principi’s policy to aid Gulf War veterans with ALS. Under that policy, ALS is considered a service-connected disease for those veterans who served in the Gulf War between August 2, 1990 and July 31, 1991.

However, ALS is not presumed to be a service-connected disease for the thousands of other veterans diagnosed with ALS even though research has demonstrated elevated rates of ALS in all veterans, regardless of whether they served in the 1991 Gulf War.

“The IOM’s conclusions help to validate what the ALS community knows all too well – that if you served in the military, you are more likely to die from ALS,” said Steve Gibson, vice president of Government Relations and Public Affairs for The ALS Association. “We strongly support calls for expanding ALS research at both the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. We also believe that ALS should be considered a service connected disease regardless of when a veteran served in the military. And we hope that the Members of the newly elected 110th Congress will join our fight in support of all veterans with ALS.”

Four studies have found evidence of the increased risk of ALS in military veterans, both those who served in the Gulf War and those with any history of military service, the IOM committee reported. The risk is as much as twice that in the general population.

Of particular importance, the IOM reviewed a study conducted by researchers from Harvard University ’s School of Public Health that found that veterans who served in the military, whether World War II, Korea or Vietnam, are at greater risk of ALS. According to the IOM report, “[T]he implication is that military service in general – not confined to exposures specific to the Gulf War – is related to the development of ALS. The findings, if validated in other studies, suggest that exposures during military service, even among those with no wartime service, might be responsible.”

The committee called for new, high quality studies to further investigate the connection between ALS and military service and to examine those aspects of military service that may cause the disease.

Factors that might feed into the increased risk of ALS in veterans include exposure to lead, pesticides or other environmental contacts, use of tobacco or alcohol or extreme physical exertion.The ALS Association has recognized the need for larger population based studies and is working with Congress to pass the ALS Registry Act (HR 4033/S. 1353), legislation that would establish a national ALS registry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The registry would collect data about ALS that could provide vital clues into the causes of the disease, including why veterans may be at greater risk.

Experts who served on the committee for the report were Richard T. Johnson, M.D. (chair), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Walter Bradley, D.M., University of Miami, Florida, Beate Ritz, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., University of California, Los Angeles, Walter A. Rocca, M.D., M.P.H., Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., Jeremy Shefner, M.D., Ph.D., State University of New York at Syracuse, and Christina Wolfson, Ph.D., McGill University, Montreal.

A report issued by the IOM in September was unable to find evidence that supports the idea of a Gulf War Syndrome but did agree that existing evidence shows increased risk of ALS among Gulf War veterans (the report is available at http://www.iom.edu/CMS/3793/24597/36955.aspx).

Copies of the latest IOM report, “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in Veterans: Review of the Scientific Literature,” are available from the National Academies Press; tel. 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242 or on the Internet at http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11757.

See The ALS Association’s web site under the research tab for further information about environmental factors in ALS. Copies of The ALS Association report: “ALS in the Military: the Unexpected Consequences of Military Service” also is available at http://www.alsa.org/files/pdf/ALS_Military_Paper.pdf. For additional information about The Association’s advocacy efforts to support military veterans, contact The Association’s Capital office at 202-638-6997

[BobbyB]

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HARLEY-DAVIDSON SUPPORTS THE 2007 NATIONAL VETERANS WHEELCHAIR GAMES
November 17, 2006 - Harley-Davidson Press Release - www.totalmotorcycle.com


The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Chapter of the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) announced that Harley-Davidson Motor Company, through a $25,000 donation, will be a major corporate underwriter for the 27th National Veterans Wheelchair Games.

"Harley-Davidson has a long-standing relationship with the military, and veterans have always been important members of our family. We are pleased to support the 27th National Veterans Wheelchair Games," said Mary Anne Martiny, manager of the Harley-Davidson Foundation.

Phil Rosenberg, Wisconsin PVA chapter president added, "WPVA is highly gratified to have Harley-Davidson Motor Company sign on as a local sponsor for the Games. What a perfect match: America's military veterans joining forces with Harley-Davidson, a universally recognized icon of American pride and ingenuity."

VA Medical Center Director Glen W. Grippen was equally impressed: "Harley-Davidson is a part of the fabric of Americana that veterans built. We are grateful for their support."

The Games will be held in Milwaukee from June 19-23, 2007 and are the largest annual wheelchair athletic event in the world, attracting teams from nearly all 50 states as well as from Puerto Rico and Great Britain. The 16 sports venues will be held throughout the metropolitan area, with the Games headquartered at the Midwest Airlines Center.

During the upcoming year, Harley-Davidson will be working with Games organizers from the VA Medical Center and the Wisconsin Chapter of PVA to raise awareness of the upcoming Games and encourage the community to embrace this opportunity to salute America's veterans.

The 2006 National Veterans Wheelchair Games were held in Anchorage, Alaska. More than 500 athletes attended including 17 wheelchair athletes from Wisconsin who won 54 medals at the week-long competition.

The National Veterans Wheelchair Games are presented each year by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Paralyzed Veterans of America. Local hosts this year are the Milwaukee VA Medical Center and the Wisconsin PVA Chapter.
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