Gulf War syndrome update

VFW Magazine, August, 2003

Several items concerning Gulf War ailments have surfaced in the news recently.

At least 41,000 U.S. troops may have been overexposed to pesticides in the 1991 war. This includes 3,500 to 4,500 who served on field sanitation teams, as pesticide applicators or as police in delousing operations. The information was published on the Web site www.gulflink.osd.mil on April 24.

Congress' General Accounting Office recommended in June that the number of troops presumed to have been exposed to sarin gas when a weapons depot was demolished at Kamisiyah in March 1991 should be more than tripled to 350,000.

Researchers at the Pentagon's Naval Health Research Center found:

* that infants born to male Gulf vets had higher rates of two types of heart valve defects;

* a higher rate of a genital urinary defect in boys conceived after the war to Gulf vet mothers; and

* Gulf War vets' children born after the war had a certain kidney defect that was not found in Gulf vets' children born before the war.

The information was published in the April edition of Birth Defects Research.