Veterans Administration again accused of covering up the causes of ‘Gulf War Syndrome’

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/14/veterans-administration-again-accused-of-covering-up-the-causes-of-gulf-war-syndrome/



Veterans Administration again accused of covering up the causes of ‘Gulf War Syndrome’
By Nora Eisenberg
Thursday, February 14, 2013 9:00 EST

The federal Institute of Medicine to much fanfare recently reported that “preliminary data” suggest that veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from the same disease — commonly called Gulf War Syndrome or Illness — that has plagued veterans of Desert Storm for over two decades. Meanwhile, an alarming but widely-ignored report by a federal panel of high-level scientists charged with advising the government on the disease accused the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs of covering up the true nature and cause of a profound systemic illness that medical scientists have traced to wartime exposures — including neurotoxins, depleted uranium, and microbes, among others.

The culprits, the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses claims, are bureaucrats in the Veterans’ Administration Office of Public Health, whose coordination of a robust strategic plan for Gulf War Illness (on which RAC had consulted) has “gutted” science, “focus,” “energy,” and budgetary resources (reduced from from $15 to $4.9 million for 20013). The Office has promulgated “fictions,” the RAC asserts, that are “contrary to well-established science,” resurrecting a discredited theory of the syndrome belied by decades of scientific research validated by the Institute of Medicine. That scientific research shows that Gulf War Syndrome or Illness is a real and profound multi-system illness appearing with an array of conditions.

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Ten years after its 1998 establishment by Congress to advise on matters of Gulf War health research, RAC published its hard-hitting 452-page review of research, “Gulf War Illness and the Health of Gulf War Veterans.” It found that there was more than just a passing correlation between wartime exposure and widespread systemic illness among veterans. Though it did not rule out depleted uranium, particulate matter and infectious agents as contributors, it found it found most compelling the scientific evidence that the prime culprits were neurotoxins — in overused insecticides, experimental anti-nerve gas pre-treatment pills, and sarin plumes from the Air Force’s bombing of an Iraqi weapons plant. “For too long,” the Committee declared in its groundbreaking 2008 report, the “lasting health consequences of the Gulf War were denied or trivialized. Few veterans have recovered or substantially improved with time.” And it recommended that identification of treatments be given highest priority for veterans.

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There were 866,000 men and women who deployed in and around Iraq and Afghanistan who later became patients in the VA system, and nearly 784,000 have filed for disability compensation. Of the nearly 800,000 sick veterans of Desert Storm, few have recovered and tens of thousands have died. But once again, the VA is denying and trivializing the profound identified illness that RAC and the Institute of Medicine, in turn, verified.