Persistent symptoms

From the moment the last shot was fired in the Gulf War, reports of inexplicable illness and death among veterans, and of birth defects among their children, began to surface. As those reports have increased in the last seven years, so has public outrage over the Defense Department’s reluctance to admit it’s anything more than a little stress, a little fatigue.

Now there is evidence that Defense’s stubborn denial that exposure to chemical and biological weapons, oil-well fires and even to innoculations against nerve gas had lasting effect may not be driven merely by the old cover-up instinct, but by bad science. A new study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology finds serious flaws in the government research the Pentagon has used to cast doubt on the existence of Gulf War Syndrome.

The government research, three studies published in 1996 and 1997, concluded that Gulf War veterans did not have higher rates of postwar death, hospitalization or children with birth defects than other veterans of the same period. That research so contradicted first-person experience that it led a presidential committee last year to recommend that future research on Gulf War veterans’s illness be taken out of government labs and turned over to an independent organization.

The new study strongly suggests that recommendation was warranted. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have found flaws in the government work that reads like the “don’t” list in a primer on the scientific method — errors in statistical analysis, allowing the three supposedly independent studies to bias one another, failing to accurately assess the health status of soldiers before they went to war and, most blatantly of all, limiting the research to records obtained only from military hospitals.

Not surprisingly, the UT Southwestern team concludes that some Gulf War veterans clearly suffer from distinct symptom clusters caused by chemical poisoning, including neurological damage associated with nerve gas and pesticides. In other words, it’s not all in their heads.

The nonscientific puzzler here is why the Pentagon seems determined to insist, no matter the evidence, that these soldiers are just a little tired and troubled, not poisoned. Not unlike other denials from another war and another poison. Vietnam’s Agent Orange veterans came home to scorn and neglect. The Gulf War’s chemical veterans came home to honors, parades and medals, but the neglect remains the same.