VA study of medical records on birth defects (was Re: [ RadSafe ] RE: uranium in the gulf war)

[Mercado, Don]

 James Salsman wrote:

The quoted conclusions are 
directly at odds with the November, 2003 Department of Veterans 
Affairs "Gulf War Review" which published this quote on page 10:

"Dr. Kang found that male Gulf War veterans reported having infants with
likely birth defects at twice the rate of non-veterans. Furthermore,
female Gulf War veterans were almost three times more likely to report
children with birth defects than their non-Gulf counterparts. The
numbers changed somewhat with medical records verification. However, Dr.
Kang and his colleagues concluded that the risk of birth defects in
children of deployed male veterans still was about 2.2 times that of
non-deployed veterans."
  -- http://www1.va.gov/gulfwar/docs/GulfWarNov03.pdf

You mysteriously neglected to include the last sentence of that
paragraph. And I quote, "His research is currently undergoing peer
review."

And if you look at the same document on page 7 there's more about Kang's
report. I quote again, "While the Associated Press and other news media
entities reported the finding, it has not yet been peer-reviewed or
published in a scientific journal, steps required to gain acceptance in
the scientific community. (Occasionally, scientific papers undergo
extensive changes during this process as methodologies are carefully
analyzed, assumptions challenged, and conclusions modified.) "

So Kang's draft report is still not accepted as factual or correct. I
don't know how long peer-review and publication take (can anyone give an
estimate?), but its been about 3 years since the draft report was first
presented. Why isn't it published yet? So, until it is published, I'd
take his findings with a grain of salt.