Re: more on DU

[Philip Hypes <phypes@lanl.gov>]

Ernesto Faillace wrote:
>As for the GWS connection, I'd suggest checking out "The Gulf War Within,"
>by Peter Radetsky, in the August, 1997 issue of Discover Magazine.  It's
>adapted from his book, "Allergic to the Twentieth Century."  Written for
>the somewhat-educated lay reader, and certainly not a venerable journal,
>but good info nonetheless.  Seems there's a lot of data indicating that no
>single agent is responsible for the range of symptoms, but that GWS is most
>likely the result of a mixture of physical stress and exposures to a number
>of chemicals, including various insecticides, pesticides, solvents, and
>anti-nerve-gas drugs (DU is hardly mentioned).

There's a reason the activists have had trouble linking DU to GWS;  see below.

*****************************

Denver Post
January 30, 2000

Massive Study Proves Gulf War Syndrome Only A Myth

By Michael Fumento

WASHINGTON - Call it 'A Tale of Two Studies,' one celebrated by the media,
the other one ignored. Both concerned Persian Gulf War syndrome, the
illness with a variety of symptoms reported by some veterans of the 1991
conflict in the Persian Gulf.

The first received tremendous media coverage, although it only involved a
handful of veterans, was privately funded by somebody with an agenda, was
conducted by people on a research gravy train and was merely announced at a
meeting.

The second was utterly ignored, though it involved a huge number of vets,
was publicly funded, involved myriad researchers from all over the country
and appeared in the prestigious, peer-reviewed American Journal of
Epidemiology.

Why the difference? Study One purported to show the existence of Gulf War
syndrome, while Study Two showed conclusively the term is worthless,
meaning nothing more than any illness, ache or pain that any Gulf vet or
veteran's spouse or child has contracted in the eight years since the war.

The first study appeared under such headlines as 'Gulf War, Brain Damage
Linked,' 'Gulf War Vets Show Brain Problems,' 'Study of Ill Gulf War
Veterans Points to Chemical Damage' and 'Gulf War Syndrome Tied to Brain
Damage.'

Released in December at a Radiological Society of North America meeting
without the benefit of any critical evaluation, it purported to show that
brain scans of sick Gulf vets had 10 percent to 25 percent lower levels of
a certain brain chemical than healthy Gulf War veterans. 'This is the first
time ever we have proof of brain damage in sick Gulf War veterans,' said
lead researcher James Fleckenstein, a radiology professor at the
Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Actually, you practically have to be brain-damaged to believe the study
proves anything other than the gullibility of the media.

Why? It wasn't published anywhere. Instead it was disseminated as an
abstract of a few hundred words. Certainly urgency didn't play a part,
considering the alleged exposures were eight years ago.

So why not let it be viewable in print? Why not let editors have a go at
it, or peer reviewers? What were the authors afraid of?

The study was partly underwritten by Mr. Conspiracy Theory himself, H. Ross
Perot. The erstwhile presidential candidate has been funding efforts to
'prove' a syndrome for years, mostly at Southwestern Medical Center.
Curiously, wherever Perot money goes, a positive finding for the syndrome
results.

It involved merely 22 sick vets and we don't know how they were chosen.
Meanwhile, there were only 16 control subjects to measure them against, and
all of them were Gulf vets themselves.

The study didn't compare Gulf War to non-Gulf War vets. It merely compared
those who felt sick to those who didn't. Thus, it couldn't possibly prove
the existence of any syndrome unique to service in the Gulf. There was no
exposure evidence for those 22 vets. All we know is they were in the Gulf
around the time the war was fought.

As one expert, Robert Roswell, chairman of the Persian Gulf coordinating
board, later observed: 'No one's ever demonstrated any specific exposure
among Gulf War veterans that could cause this kind of change in the brain.' 

In short, on a scale of one to 10 in value, this study was about a minus
three.

Now what of the American Journal of Epidemiology study? It found that among
hospitalized veterans, Gulf War vets are suffering no more illness than
veterans who didn't deploy to the Gulf theater.

The study included 650,000 American veterans of the Gulf War and compared
them with 650,000 nondeployed vets. For the mathematically impaired, that's
slightly more than 22 plus 16.

Furthermore, it looked at vets treated in three different hospital systems,
the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs and hospitals in California.

Navy and VA officials evaluated these veterans for everything from cancer
to heart disease to mental disorders to skin diseases for a total of 14
problems in all.

Yet of the 14 categories among the three sets, they found statistically
significant increases in problems in only four of the 42 'slices' of the data.

Conversely, they found significant decreases in problems in 11 of the
slices. If anything, the Gulf vets were healthier than those who didn't
deploy to the Gulf.

One possible explanation for this seemingly strange outcome is that better
health now might reflect better health from eight years ago, when more
sickly vets were more likely to be kept out of Operation Desert
Storm.

But in any case, the massive study blows apart the myth of the Gulf War vet
as a victim of some mysterious ailment. They are 'victims' of slightly
superior health, nothing more.

Earlier, smaller studies comparing Gulf vets to nondeployed ones have made
similar findings concerning the number of miscarriages and birth defects
among the veterans' children.

The real mystery might be why you're reading this here first. Why was I
unable to find a single reference to this published, peer-reviewed study in
the vast Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, magazines and radio and TV
broadcasts? Yet the ridiculous Texas study received over 50 references.

Then again, why should the media help blow the lid off Gulf War syndrome
when, with the help of a few activists and demagogic congressmen, the media
created it in the first place?

Michael Fumento is a senior fellow in Washington for the Indianapolis-
based Hudson Institute, specializing in health and
science issues.
___________________________________________________________
Philip Hypes
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Safeguards Science and Technology Group (NIS 5)
(505) 667-1556  phypes@lanl.gov

Opinions expressed are purely my own unless otherwise noted

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