Pentagon Drawing New Fire Over ‘Gulf War Disease’

The U.S. military was too preoccupied with its war mission in the Persian Gulf to prepare for dealing with its potential health aftermath, according to a report Wednesday from the highly respected Institute of Medicine.

The military failed to keep adequate medical records for its troops in the region and, as a result, has had difficulty determining the causes of a range of ailments suffered by about 60,000 individuals who served there, according to a panel convened by the institute.

The institute called for the military to overhaul its medical record-keeping system. It also said that any future military health research should be examined by outside scientific experts before it is given funding--as is any research conducted in the mainstream scientific community.

The report is another that is critical of the Pentagon for its handling of complaints by thousands of “Gulf War disease” victims. Critics are demanding the creation of a new, independent system to safeguard the health of troops in military missions.

Pentagon officials had no immediate reaction to the report, but a spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs said VA officials are “generally supportive of the goals” proposed by the institute.

The institute is a part of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent, congressionally chartered organization that provides health, medical and scientific policy advice to the federal government. Typically, the academy convenes panels of outside experts to study important policy questions. Their conclusions often have considerable influence among decision-makers.

Persian Gulf War veterans have reported an array of debilitating symptoms since their return, including aching joints, sleep disorders, memory loss and serious neurological problems.

“Six years after almost 700,000 American troops were sent to the Gulf, major questions remain about whether some of their health problems resulted from their military service,” said John Bailar, chairman of the University of Chicago’s health studies department, who headed the panel.

The recent revelation that some troops were likely exposed to chemical weapons “heightens our obligation to soldiers and their families to provide investigators with an atmosphere most conducive to proper research,” Bailar added.

The Defense Department recently confirmed that as many as 15,000 U.S. soldiers probably were exposed to nerve agents in 1991 after blowing up the Khamisiyah weapons-storage complex in Iraq, but the panel was not able to fully consider that incident because the information came to it too late.

But the Khamisiyah disclosure adds to “questions about the completeness of exposure information provided” by the Pentagon, Bailar said.

Earlier this week, Defense Department officials said they were investigating another 1991 intelligence report that suggested that U.S. troops may have been nearby when Iraq used mustard gas against Shiite Muslim nomads in southern Iraq just after the war ended.

The report released Wednesday, which was requested by Congress and paid for by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, recommended that the two departments and all branches of the military establish a uniform electronic database that would include health information about every individual in each branch of the armed services.

Currently, medical records are kept by each organization separately, “making it difficult to follow the medical history of each individual service person,” the institute said.

The panel urged that the military prepare for all future conflicts with advance plans to monitor natural and man-made environmental exposure and develop ways to respond rapidly with data collection and early investigation.

The report acknowledged that “the very nature of war, where preparation for future medical or epidemiological evaluation is not the primary mission,” was a major problem in investigating victims’ complaints. Nevertheless, even in a wartime setting, it should be “possible to anticipate the information needed for research,” the committee said.

The panel also urged that all future federally funded military health research undergo a process similar to that followed by the mainstream scientific community. Under that process, research proposals typically are evaluated by other scientists and funding decisions are based on their recommendations.

After research is completed, the conclusions are reviewed by other researchers in the field--a process known as “peer review”--before they can be published in a scientific or medical journal.

Along those lines, the panel said the government should require disclosure of the results of all federally funded research related to unexplained illnesses stemming from military action.

Terry Jemison, a spokesman for the Veterans Affairs Department, said it intends to study the report and respond in detail later. However, he said, “generally we are supportive of the goals the institute has identified and we are looking at the best ways of accomplishing the recommendations.”

Pentagon officials did not return a reporter’s telephone calls.

In Tampa, Fla., where several groups are meeting to discuss the issue of Gulf War illnesses, Art Caplan, a medical ethicist who serves on the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, said the report underscores the fact that 1991 military planners were not prepared for the full implications of modern warfare.

Moreover, he and others said the Pentagon’s handling of the matter has created “an explosion of doubt” that has seriously hurt efforts to elicit information about war-related symptoms.

Cimons reported from Washington and Pine reported from Tampa.