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

2004: The New York Times -- Chemicals Sickened Gulf War Veterans, Latest Study Finds: A federal panel of medical experts studying illnesses among veterans of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf has broken with several earlier studies and concluded that many suffer from neurological damage caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, rejecting past findings that the ailments resulted mostly from wartime stress ... the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses concluded in its draft report that "a substantial proportion of Gulf war veterans are ill with multisymptom conditions not explained by wartime stress or psychiatric illness." (The New York Times, front page, October 15, 2004)

No to $5 Million for the Sick, Yes to $450 Million for the Syndrome

Truth was systematically perverted during discussions of the Gulf War syndrome. Stated bluntly, the health and lives of the sick veterans were sacrificed at the altar of the pseudoscience of the one-disease/one-cause/one-drug model of the prevailing medical thought. Am I being melodramatic? Consider the following three quotes from the prestigious science journal Nature concerning the issue:

Nature, October 19, 2000 (page 819): Desperately seeking a syndrome -- The US Congress should stop pushing researchers to invent a medical definition for Gulf War syndrome, the collection of maladies associated with veterans of the 1991 conflict in the Persian Gulf.

Nature, March 8, 2001 (page 135): Fracas over $5 million Gulf syndrome grant. The battle over Gulf War syndrome has broken out again ... this time over a US $5 million grant. The funding has been granted without peer review, to the laboratory of clinician Robert Haley, whose research on veterans is controversial ... "Those goofballs in the Pentagon are trying to just sell stress [as the cause of Gulf War illness] and not do anything for the men...." [says Ross Perot]

Nature, July 4, 2002 (page 4): On 25 June, an advisory panel appointed by veterans' affairs secretary Anthony Principi concluded that research into whether neurological damage had been caused by vaccination or exposure to nerve agents "should be aggressively pursued," and recommended that Congress commit $450 million over three years to the project.

Enger and Ready to Meet the Veterans' Medical Needs

Today (as I write this) is Veteran's Day, November 11, 2004. This morning on CNN, the Secretary of Veterans' Affairs assures the nation that the VA hospital system is eager and ready to meet all the medical needs of all Iraq War veterans. What does be mean? I wondered. In hundreds of the conferences of nutritionist-physicians and clinical ecologists I have attended during the last 25 years, I do not recall meeting any physician working in the VA hospital system. Nor am I aware of nutritional or detox therapies administered in that system. So how is the VA system eager and ready to serve the Iraq War veterans? I do not know anyone in the VA system who is seriously addressing--even merely writing about--the crucial issues of expanded nutritional and detoxification needs of the sick veterans. Does the Secretary mean that those veterans have no special nutritional or detox needs?