Lieberman still leading the race
Ned Lamont, whose anti-war campaign rattled the political landscape with a victory over Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary, is gaining voter support – but Lieberman still leads the race by double digits, a poll released Thursday shows.
The Quinnipiac University survey has found over the past three months that Lieberman’s support has changed little while Lamont’s support has jumped:
•In early June, Lieberman was at 56 percent, Lamont at 18 percent and Republican Alan Schlesinger trailed far behind at 8 percent.
•By mid-July, Lieberman was at 51 percent, Lamont at 27 percent and Schlesinger at 9 percent.
•Now, the latest poll shows Lieberman at 49 percent, Lamont at 38 percent and Schlesinger at 4 percent.
Washington
Vietnam vets’ PTSD refigured
A widely quoted estimate that almost one in three Vietnam veterans developed post-traumatic stress disorder was too high, says a reanalysis that puts the toll closer to one in five.
Post-traumatic stress disorder now is understood to be triggered by a variety of traumatic experiences, not just combat, but medical authorities first accepted it as a psychiatric condition in 1980 at the urging of Vietnam veterans.
Then came the controversy over its prevalence. In the late 1980s, two studies issued vastly different estimates.
A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that 14.7 percent of veterans developed the disorder after serving in Vietnam and that 2.2 percent still had it at that time.
A second, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, estimated that 30.9 percent of the veterans had developed the disorder and 15.2 percent of them were suffering it more than a decade after the war.
Columbia University scientists took another look at that second study, using more precise symptom definitions. Their work, reported in today’s edition of the journal Science, showed that 18.7 percent of Vietnam veterans had developed the disorder and 9.1 percent were suffering it by the end of the 1980s.