On January 17, 1991, at approximately 3 am,
Operation Desert Storm began. This was an allied invasion of Iraq. Cease-fire negotiations started on March 1, 1991; Iraq officially accepted the cease-fire terms about a month later.
For many Gulf War veterans, the war never really ended. Approximately 30% of these veterans experience a combination of potentially debilitating physical symptoms, including joint and muscle pain, chronic headaches, cognitive problems, gastrointestinal abnormalities, and skin problems.
The US and UK governments turned a deaf ear on the veterans, saying that it was difficult to pin down a cause for these symptoms, and that their origin was probably psychiatric.
Well, in November 2004, the US completely reversed their stance. From a November 15, 2004 VA press release (PDF):
The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, a Congressionally-chartered panel of scientific experts and veterans, has released its first major report on Gulf War illnesses.
[snip]
Based on the latest research findings from hundreds of scientific studies and government reports, the Committee concluded that:
- A substantial proportion, 25 to 30 percent, of veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War suffer from illnesses characterized by persistent headaches, memory problems, pain, fatigue, and other chronic symptoms
- Gulf War illnesses are not explained by stress or psychiatric illness for the large majority of ill veterans
- Ill Gulf War veterans exhibit evidence of neurological problems, including a significant excess in the rate of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease
- Accumulated research supports a probable link between Gulf War illnesses and neurotoxic exposures encountered in the war
- Treatments to improve the health of ill veterans are urgently needed
- Research on Gulf War veterans' illnesses has important implications for current and future military deployments and homeland security
(Emphasis added)
The Secretary of Veteran Affairs also announced that $15 million would be allocated to research on Gulf War illnesses in fiscal year 2005.
The report was based upon the results of over 350 scientific studies and government reports. Rather than go through all 152 pages of the report (you can download it from that link), let's focus on the work of Dr. Robert Haley, who was one of the main consultants for the report. His work deals with the link between veterans' exposures to certain chemicals in Iraq, and their neurological difficulties.
Continued below the fold.
The British science magazine
New Scientist has a nice, user-friendly
article describing the VA's changed approach to Gulf War illnesses, as well as Haley's research:
Haley's studies revealed three clusters of symptoms (see table), which he thinks are variants of the same disease (New Scientist print edition, 29 March 2003). His findings have been verified by other labs. Han Kang at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington DC found the same clusters when he compared 10,000 Gulf to 9000 non-Gulf veterans.
All were more frequent in Gulf veterans, and the most severe syndrome did not appear in non-Gulf veterans. Similar studies by Keiji Fukuda and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta concluded "a chronic multisystem condition was significantly associated with deployment to the Gulf".
Here's the table to which the article refers (click to enlarge):
- Pyridostigmine bromide is a drug that protects against the effects of nerve agents, but under some conditions, it can also be neurotoxic.
- The type of pesticides to which the table refers are organophosphate pesticides, which kill insects the same way nerve agents kill humans. If a human has too much exposure to these pesticides (which were used extensively during the Gulf War to prevent pest-born diseases), chronic neurological problems can result. DEET is an insect repellant the soldiers used. If too much is used over time, it can cause neurological damage.
- Finally, the table lists sarin, which is a nerve agent that Iraq was known to have at the time of the Gulf War.
Quoting from the
New Scientist article again:
It now appears there was plenty of sarin about. The US Department of Defense told a Senate investigation in 1994 that each of the 14,000 chemical weapons alarms around the troops went off on average two or three times a day during allied aerial bombardment of Iraq - a total of between 1 and 2 million alarms.
"All alarms were said to be false," James Tuite, a consultant to the investigation, told the Lloyd inquiry. But UN inspectors later found Iraqi chemical weapons dumps damaged by bombing, upwind of the Kuwait-Saudi border - where troops were most likely to later become ill (see map).
In particular, the blowing up of a large chemical weapons dump at Khamisiyah in March 1991 - after the fighting was over and chemical weapons detectors had been removed - created a plume of gas, which would have contained sarin and which could have affected at least 100,000 Allied soldiers, possibly far more.
A Congressional study released in June this year found that the plume was "significantly higher" (taller) than the DoD claimed in its analysis in 2000, so the chemicals in it could have drifted over a wider area. Meanwhile, it found that two epidemiological surveys based on that analysis, which found no ill health linked to sarin exposure, were fundamentally flawed. The VA agreed.
(see the map at the right, click to enlarge)
It's ironic that the very reason for the current Iraq war (WMDs) are the reason some of the veterans of the first Gulf War are getting sick.
Do the troops involved in the current Iraq war have to worry?
Gulf war syndrome is obviously very complex. If you read through the entire report, you'll see that the writers stress over and over again that more research needs to be done. We know that nerve agents can probably be eliminated from the mix, but there are many other toxic substances that are cause for concern.
Since I know you're going to ask about depleted uranium, and since I just wanted to cover specific neurotoxins here, I'll direct you to a couple of places to read about DU:
- I wrote an extensive diary about depleted uranium, focusing on the use of DU munitions in Iraq.
- Gulf War and Health: Volume 1. Depleted Uranium, Pyridostigmine Bromide, Sarin, and Vaccines (Institute of Medicine, National Academies Press, 2000). You can click through the table of contents, and read the whole thing online if you want. If you look at the conclusions to the depleted uranium part of that report, you'll see that it is inconclusive what role, if any, depleted uranium plays in Gulf war syndrome.
Let's hope that $15 million the VA has set aside for research is put to good use, and that they get much more money in the future.