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What about Silicone Breast Implants?

© Kathern Welsh

Advertisements for breast augmentation is beginning to increase once again. Many women and even some men, have claimed to have suffered many illnesses and health reversals due to what they believe to be the ill effects of silicone breast implants. The medical community has continued to ignore any possible connection between these devices and the diseases which thousands of people claim to have suffered. They claim there are no conclusive tests which prove the silicone is responsible. Even despite reports from physicians that their patients' puzzling symptoms often disappear when their implants are removed - there has been little "hard evidence" to link silicone implants to disease.

Pathologist Nir Kossovsky of UCLA, contends, "The problem with the Mayo Clinic study is that medical records will never reveal a disease which physicians have not yet learned to recognize." He further explains, "There's a problem when people look at charts for evidence of disease. It's like King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella telling Columbus to look at the ships logs of all the other captains to find out if there's any evidence that the world is really round."

Dr. Kossovsky concludes by saying, "The hard data - the fundamental physical and immunological data - say there's got to be a disease out there, and we've just got to ask the right questions, and look in the right places, to find it."

Salvador Liccardo, an attorney who has spent three years collecting data on the relationship of silicone to disease has extensive and enlightening data. His story goes back to 1957 - five years before the first silicone breast implant. Mr. Liccardo was stationed at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, working in the Signal Corps as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. His chief operating officer was concerned about the exposure his men faced by leaky radio transmitters. He was assigned to conduct medical and scientific research on the potential dangers of fumes coming out of transformers that the army used as power boosters for communications equipment.

Mr. Liccardo discovered that, beginning in the 1940's, Michigan-based Dow Corning Corp. supplied the Army with silica-based DC200, a compound used in transformers as a coolant. The same material, with some variation, could be developed into putty strong enough to plug holes in ships, according to Mr. Liccardo.

In 1958, Mr. Liccardo, then 21, wrote an Army report that asserted silicone was dangerous, if ingested into the body. In 1991, he and his staff spent four months studying the evidence before deciding to make a legal claim against implant manufacturers, but he'd figured out the basic chemistry years earlier when he was working in the Army.

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