A real answer for Gulf War One Veterans 17 years late

There has been numerous stories over the years about the mysterious medical maladies that has become known as Gulf War Illness or the Gulf War Syndrome.  Many people have writen it off as mental conditions rooted with no links to "real" medical probelms.

The Department of Defense had a vested interest in finding no link to any cause that would hold them liable for compensation payments. If they could link the physical ailments that the 500,000 Gulf War era veterans were experiencing, the cost of compensation paid to veterans and their families would escalate by the billions, and rapidly. So research contracts were written in such ways that full disclosure would never be known and past medical studies with chemical weapons were to be ignored.

For years the Department of Defense refused to even admit that the soldiers in the Middle East were even exposed to chemical weapons at Kamisayah, Iraq in March 1991, when they destroyed the auumition bunkers that belonged to the Iraqi Army. These bunkers contained artillery shells loadedwith Sarin and mustard agents, rockets containing the same substances, rather remove these weapons and let chemical teams destroy them properly, someone got the bright idea to just blow them all up, thinking the weapons would be destroyed in the explosion.

Well they were, except they released a toxic xloud that traveled on the winds of the desert, spread from Iraq, thru Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Oman and the Persian Gulf.
After the release of some CIA documents in 1996 the department of defense finally admitted to Congress that yes many of the soldiers deployed had been exposed.

They forced the DOD to do follow up medical studies to determine how the veterans would have been affected. They set up some experiments in Dugway, Utah to replicate the scenario, however the winds and contaminants were not the same, and a true picture was never seen.Links to many documents about the exposures are located here. The government does not make it easy to track the information.

After First Lady Hillary Clinton got involved in Gulf war Illness, DOD contracted with the National Academies of Science and the Institute of Medicine Medical Follow up unit (MUFA) in 1996 to do a long term health study based on the enlisted soldiers used in chemical weapons experiments from 1955 thru 1975 at Edgewood Arsenal, and to use them as the control group.

There were some problems in the language in the contract and the data was not gathered until FY 2000 when the men were between the ages of 45 - 65. The report published March 2003  Sarin Report found no long term medical problems except that 25 personnel per 100,000 would get brain tumors.

This study did not match any other medical studies based on chemical weapon exposures, there are not many but there are a few one compiled by the Narional Institute of Health in January 1994 published here and then this 1975 report written by a German doctor who spent more than 30 years working with Wermacht soldiers after WW2 that worked in the Third Reich's chemical weapon program, this study found medical problems in all major body systems, nuerological, pulmonary, cardiovascular and digestive systems this study bt Karl Heniz Lohs was the most comprehensive document written at it's time Dr Lohs SIPRI Report from 1975

Dr Page ignored these two pieces of research when he did the DOD study that would be the basis for compensation for the Allied troops of the first Gulf War, due to his report, the veterans were again written off as mental cases.

This week DR Golomb of the University of California at San Diego released this report, titled Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and Gulf War illnesses

Increasing evidence suggests excess illness in Persian Gulf War veterans (GWV) can be explained in part by exposure of GWV to organophosphate and carbamate acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEis), including pyridostigmine bromide (PB), pesticides, and nerve agents. Evidence germane to the relation of AChEis to illness in GWV was assessed. Many epidemiological studies reported a link between AChEi exposure and chronic symptoms in GWV. The link is buttressed by a dose–response relation of PB pill number to chronic symptoms in GWV and by a relation between avidity of AChEi clearance and illness, based on genotypes, concentrations, and activity levels of enzymes that detoxify AChEis. Triangulating evidence derives from studies linking occupational exposure to AChEis to chronic health symptoms that mirror those of ill GWV. Illness is again linked to lower activity of AChEi detoxifying enzymes and genotypes conferring less-avid AChEi detoxification. AChEi exposure satisfies Hill's presumptive criteria for causality, suggesting this exposure may be causally linked to excess health problems in GWV.

This is the Rueters article about the study from Dr. Golomb

She also found a link between the amount of exposure to the chemicals and how common symptoms were in these veterans.

Golomb believes genetic variants make some people more susceptible to such chemicals, and when exposed, these people had a higher risk of illness.

"A lot of attention has gone to psychological factors in illness in Gulf War veterans," Golomb said. But she said the ground conflict in the Gulf War lasted only four days, unlike the current conflict.

"Psychological stressors are inadequate to account for the excess illness seen," she said.

She said this knowledge should help protect troops from such problems arising in the future. Her team is also looking at ways to mitigate symptoms in Gulf War veterans.

After 17 years, it is my experience that the Veterans Administration and the Department of defense will NOT accept this study on face value, they will dismiss it as an agenda piece, and that casual relationships are not enough to establish compensation. They will continue to blame the medical problems on pyschosomatic reasons and deny compensation.

Me I believe the study from DR Golomb, the 1994 NIH study and the 1975 SIPRI study by the German doctor who spent 30 years working on the Wermacht soldiers. I doubt the VA and the Department of Defense.