U.S. to Probe Illness Among Gulf Veterans : Health: Maladies cited by returned soldiers may be linked to exposure to the petroleum fires in Kuwait, officials say.

The Veterans Affairs Department is launching a program to look for unusual patterns of illness among veterans of the Gulf War amid mounting indications of a new affliction related to exposure to Kuwait’s oil fires.

A spokesman for the Veterans Administration, Terry Jemison, on Friday acknowledged that doctors are seeing “more and more anecdotal reports” that may point to the health effects of exposure to petroleum fires.

Soldiers coming home from the Middle East have been complaining of such maladies as fatigue, depression, hair loss, aching joints, rashes, parasitic infections and sore and bleeding gums.

In recent months, Army specialists have attributed many of those illnesses to stress, leading some Gulf veterans to charge that the government is abandoning them. But on Aug. 5, President Bush told a convention of Disabled American Veterans that he had ordered the creation of a task force to aid Gulf War veterans suffering from illnesses that may be the result of their foreign deployment.

The Pentagon, stung by the charge that it is ignoring soldiers’ complaints, has protested that it has been tracking soldiers with prolonged exposure to the burning oil fires ever since just after the war’s end.

In addition, the Pentagon has established a working group--composed of specialists in occupational and preventive medicine, environmental health and industrial hygiene--to explore the health effects of the Kuwait oil fire smoke. The panel, which is also expected to propose safety measures for soldiers in the future, is expected to make its recommendations later this year.

Maj. Gen. Frederick N. Bussey of the Pentagon’s Office of the Surgeon General recently acknowledged that military doctors have concluded that psychological stress “may be a factor in some, but by no means all,” of the reported illnesses. But he said the Pentagon is not dismissing their complaints.

“Some of our soldiers are sick, and we are determined to see that they get proper medical care for any problems arising from their service,” Bussey wrote recently.

Marine Capt. Dave Fournier, for example, has been hospitalized at Camp Lejeune, N.C., with pneumonia and heart problems. He is going bald rapidly, has night sweats and is constantly fatigued. All of this began since the 41-year-old Fournier returned 16 months ago from the Persian Gulf War.

Like some other veterans, Fournier blames his symptoms on fumes from the Kuwaiti oil well fires set by Iraq. But the cause of the ailments has not been identified.

When Indiana reservists complained of such symptoms some months ago, an Army study of the 79 war veterans resulted in a military finding that they may have been caused by stress.

But doctors have recently found high levels of hydrocarbons in the blood of a Navy veteran in Texas. And at Ft. Bragg, N.C., a private group called the Military Family Support Network says 100 soldiers on whom it has background have been associated with an unusually high number of illnesses, birth defects and miscarriages.

“We are telling our people that (the veterans) could have problems that could be caused by smoke, contaminated food or drink, burning oil wells, all sorts of environmental conditions that the troops ran into,” Veterans Secretary Edward J. Derwinski said.

Derwinski urged Gulf War veterans to register with the VA so they can be screened “even if they at this point don’t have any special problems.”

The effort is being launched to avoid a repeat of the Agent Orange debacle, according to Derwinski.

Veterans complained for years of medical problems they believed stemmed from exposure to the herbicide widely used in Vietnam, but disability payments for those suffering nerve disease weren’t approved until last year. The government still denies any connection between Agent Orange and lung cancer.

This time, Jemison said, “We are trying to get ahead of the science. We are trying to get the system set up before problems come in.”