Let's put this stress theory into perspective with prior wars.
At last count, 16% of the 700,000 troops who served in Desert Storm have been awarded disability benefits by the VA, in a war that only lasted 100 hours 16 percent.
Only 9.6% of Vietnam veterans were awarded disability benefits, a long harsh war that lasted ten years.
Korea, another long, bloody war, had only 5% awarded benefits.
Veterans of World War II had only 6.6% awarded benefits
The Research Working group has spent $500 million so far in their response to
Gulf War illness; half a billion dollars!
Last year the GAO produced an analysis of this research and found that of the
21 major research questions proposed by the Research Working Group,
as high priorities to Gulf War illness, not one question has been answered after
spending $500 million. Not one!
So how has the Research Working Group spent the money?
$175 million was spent on the Combined Clinical Evaluation Protocol and the VA's Persian Gulf Examination Program. These programs provided basic physical exams for over 100,000 Gulf War veterans, but they did not include tests, like brain scans and genetic tests, that would lead to identifying the problem. It was a complete waste of money.
$150 million has been spent on the activities of OSAGWI, the Office of Special Assistance for Gulf War Illness. Its primary focus was to convince the American people that the veterans are only suffering from stress. It was a $150 million public relations campaign. The top doctor in OSAGWI now works for the VA's Office of Research!
When veterans and the media complained about what OSAGWI was doing,
President Clinton appointed a Presidential Special Oversight Board to look into it.
Just before their report came out giving OSAGWI a clean bill of health, the leading scientists on the staff resigned in protest, claiming that their reports critical of OSAGWI had been changed to positive.
One of the top managers of that Special Oversight Board, a long-time PR man for the
Pentagon, is reported to have said over and over, "The only problem with the Gulf War illness is that we did not manage the press soon enough." This man now works in the VA's Office of Research!
Another $175 million has gone into the Research Working Group's peer-review funded research. But what has come out of their research? Basically, the peer- review funding system supported a lot of research on stress, and they funded a lot of studies to show that Gulf War veterans are not very sick.
Three years ago, Dr. Kang, a researcher in the VA Central Office, completed a large study of 20,000 veterans showing that there is a neurological Gulf War syndrome and that veterans who were exposed to low-level nerve gas were 7 times more likely to have it.
This directly duplicated Dr. Haley's epidemiologic study. But after three years, where is the journal publication? It appears that they have withheld it from publication because the findings violate the government's stress policy.
Dr. Kang recently published another study showing that the children born to Gulf War veterans have 2 to 3 times more birth defects than those born to other military personnel.
But government officials diffused that finding by saying that they had not yet reviewed the medical records of the babies to be sure the veterans weren't lying about birth defects.
How many years does it take to review those medical records?
In short, the research funded by the peer-review system of the Research Working Group seems to have been put through a filter, and only that showing stress gets through. All the rest is filtered out.
Again and again, the propaganda team falsely promotes these messages:
a.. "there is no unique illness"
b.. "we will never know the cause"
c.. "we did not keep records" (they kept records, but destroyed them later).
d.. "there are no objective measurements"
Any government employee who questions the stress theory is open to sudden intense criticism, as are the researchers with distinguished credentials in the private sector. This is inexcusable
Labels: chronic illness desert storm desert storm DOD war gulf war health illness Iraq syndrome VA veterans women DOD forgotten war gulf war health illness syndrome VA veterans women
