U.S. to Develop Rules for Gulf Veterans Seeking Disability Aid

Although the cause of pain, headaches and fatigue plaguing some Persian Gulf War veterans remains a mystery, officials said Friday they hope to create guidelines by this summer that will enable those afflicted to qualify for disability benefits.

Officials from the departments of defense and veterans affairs and the National Institutes of Health will meet in May in an effort to develop diagnostic guidelines for what has become known as “Persian Gulf syndrome.”

Once that is done, benefits could become available to veterans “who can be shown to have that type of illness and associate that with their period of military service,” said Dr. Robert Roswell, chief of staff at the VA medical center in Birmingham, Ala.

Roswell will direct the Persian Gulf Veterans Coordinating Board, established Friday to coordinate research into the unexplained ailments, medical treatment and the dissemination of information among the VA, the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Slightly less than 10% of the 30,000 disability claims submitted since the war ended in February, 1991, have been based on alleged exposures to various environmental hazards. They include Kuwaiti oil well fires, parasites, petrochemicals, tank shells made of depleted uranium, microwaves and possible traces of chemical and biological warfare agents.

All of the environment-related claims are being funneled through the VA’s regional office in Louisville, Ky. Of approximately 2,800 submitted so far, more than 900 have been denied while 163 have been ruled service-connected disabilities, said Gary Hickman, director of the VA’s compensation and pension service. About 1,700 remain unresolved, he said.

“Certainly, this was a very environmentally dirty war,” Roswell said. “I personally believe that we’re likely to find that there are multiple causes for the symptoms that remain undiagnosed.”

Under a bill passed by Congress last year, Gulf War veterans do not have to prove their illness’s connection to their service to get treatment at the VA’s 172 hospitals.

“We believe there are several hundred to possibly 1,000 or 2,000 veterans who have symptoms which at this time we’re not able to adequately explain,” Roswell said.

“We’re not excluding the possibility that chemical (warfare) agents might have been a factor even though the confirmed detections were only present in very, very low doses that probably would not be clinically significant,” he said.

Thousands of the 650,000 military personnel who participated in the Persian Gulf War have been treated for other service-connected ailments and injuries.