Prevention of the Iraq War-associated sickness : a prediction and a challenge to the Department of Defense

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Feb-March, 2005 by Majid Ali

I dedicate this column to the courageous and valiant women and men who fought and/or are fighting the Iraq War. Many of them are sick now. Many more will become sick with passing months, and will remain so for years to come. I predict that a large fraction of them will be disabled for many years. That is sad because I believe most of that sickness is preventable. However, it cannot be prevented with antidepressants, anxiolytic agents, broad-spectrum antibiotics, or talk therapy. To be effective, the sick veterans will have to be managed with a new model based on solid scientific knowledge concerning the dysfunctional cellular energetics--redox dysequilibrium and oxygen dyshomeostasis--in the chronically ill veterans caused by the growing burden of incremental and functional nutritional deficits, environmental toxins, and stress-related issues.

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I could not have made the above prediction of disabling disorder of cellular energetics in the 2004 Iraq War veterans except in light of experience with the veterans of the 1991 conflict in the Persian Gulf. In 1991, while writing The Canary and Chronic Fatigue, I saw a flash picture of the Kuwait oil field in smoke and recognized two things clearly: first, that many returning veterans will develop a largely preventable chronic illness; and second, that illness will be chalked up to a psychosomatic disorder and the sick veterans will be prescribed antidepressants, anxiolytic drugs, and talk therapy--measures that provide temporary relief but mask the worsening deeper problem of seriously disrupted cellular energetics. I devoted a few pages to my sense of that upcoming disaster in Canary. (1)

Terror Turns into Toxicity, Toxicity into Terror

My warning in Canary about the Gulf War veterans went unheeded. Why? Because the experts of the Department of Defense (DOD) were unable to reach beyond the old and obsolete one-cause/one-disease/one-drug model of thinking. They could not--or did not want to--accept a simple fact of human biology: At a cellular level, terror turns into toxicity, and toxicity into terror. Both terror and toxicity feed on each other, and cumulatively lead to cellular oxidosis, acidosis, and dysoxygenosis. (2-5) It is important to point out that I did not find a single reference to severe and persisting derangements of redox equilibrium and oxygen homeostasis in the sick veterans of the 1991 war in hundreds of reports on the subject. Needless to say, psychological evaluations were not an acceptable substitute for laboratory tests to detect crucial defects in cellular energetics. Nor were the prescriptions for sleeping pills, anxiolytic drugs, antidepressants, and talk therapy satisfactory responses to deepening energy and immune crises of the sick veterans.

The Challenge

In this column I challenge the DOD to consider a proposal for the prevention of the Iraq War-associated sickness ("I-WAS") based on an energetic-molecular model of chronic disabling illness focused on solid scientific evidence for redox dysequilibrium and oxygen dyshomeostasis seen in persons with intracellular accumulation of toxic substances--metabolites of the Krebs cycle, products of impaired hepatic detoxification pathways, mycotoxins, mitochondrial uncouplers, and others. (6-9) Why should the DOD consider my proposal for this clinical trial? I ask the DOD to consider the following three quotes, one from Navy News and two from The New York Times:

1995: Navy News--Gulf War Syndrome--Who's Addressing the Issue? Long before the first veterans returned from the Persian Gulf Dr. Majid Ali, associate professor of pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York, predicted five outcomes: (1) That a large number of service men and women in the Persian Gulf region would return with a variety of chronic environmental, immune and stress-related problems; (2) The disabling fatigue would be a dominant clinical feature while other symptoms would include recurrent infection, food allergy reactions, abdominal problems, disorders of mood and memory, and skin rashes, among others; (3) That sick veterans would initially be dismissed as malingerers and labeled with various psychiatric diagnoses and prescribed large doses of mind-numbing drugs; (4) That the chronic health disorders of these veterans would worsen with multiple drug therapies; and (5) That when everything else failed, these veterans would be prescribed long-term broad-spectrum antibiotic therapy that would play further havoc with their bowel systems. Five years later these predictions are now observable facts. Headlines debate the cause and fate of those men and women who left healthy and returned home sick--nearly 75,000 at last count. (Navy News, September 13, 1995)

1996: The New York Times -- Current evidence does not support a causal link between the symptoms of chronically ill veterans of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf. (Report of the President's Advisory Committee to President Clinton, quoted by The New York Times, October 15, 2004)