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The US government came under renewed heavy criticism last week for its investigations and handling of the elusive collection of symptoms known as ‘Gulf War illnesses’. Two reports, one adopted by a congressional committee and one still in draft form, have highlighted research into chemicals exposure during the war.

The House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight adopted unanimously a report that assails the Departments of Defense (DOD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) for the weakness of their efforts to establish the cause or causes of Gulf War illnesses. This failing of research, the report says, as well as lapses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), amount to a government effort that the congressional committee called “irreparably flawed”.

In particular, says the 140-page report, the DOD and VA resisted and then mishandled investigations into chemicals exposures as a potential source of the various symptoms experienced by some 100,000 Gulf War veterans. The departments' behaviour, it says, has been “plagued by arrogant incuriosity and a pervasive myopia that sees a lack of evidence as proof”.

Among the report's recommendations are that the DOD and VA should lose their authority over further research on Gulf War illnesses to another agency able to develop a research agenda “more objectively”.

Equally harsh criticism is contained in another report — still officially private — handed on 31 October to President Bill Clinton, who is expected to release and react to it within two weeks. That report, by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, praises the DOD for improving its research, but says the Pentagon “failed to pursue, acknowledge or even account for” chemicals exposures said to have been detected by US Marines who crossed an Iraqi minefield when entering Kuwait in February 1991.

A draft of this presidential report was obtained by the New York Times, which printed excerpts last week. These called the DOD's failure to investigate the minefield incident fully “highly damaging to DOD's credibility”. The news account quotes the report as stating that “the comittee perceives that public mistrust about the Government's handling of gulf war veterans' illnesses has not only endured, it has expanded”.

The VA and DOD declined to respond officially to the presidential report until it is made public. But Captain Tom Gilroy, a DOD spokesman, calls the February 1991 minefield incident “old news”, and points out that since July, the DOD has had posted on its website a full account of the incident, as well as a related chapter from a top-secret report compiled for DOD by the Mitre Corporation of Bedford, Massachusetts. (The website address is http://www.gulflink.osd.mil.)

Joyce Lashof, chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee and a professor emerita of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, also declined to comment on the substance of her committee's report. But she said any exposure suffered by Marines in the February 1991 incident was “very low level, subclinical”, and that the committee stands by the position it took in a January 1997 report: “that available scientific evidence does not indicate that long-term health effects occur in humans following low-level exposure to chemical warfare agents”.

The congressional report argues otherwise, calling the circumstantial evidence for such a link “overwhelming”. But it says proof may be lost forever because of the DOD's and VA's handling of the research. The departments, says the report, prematurely ruled out toxic exposure as a cause of Gulf veterans' symptoms, assuming that unless there was an immediate acute reaction, exposure could not have caused long-term symptoms. As a result, “federal research strategy has been blind to promising hypotheses”, the report states.

Citing a 1997 report by the General Accounting Office, it notes, for instance, that the government funded multiple studies of the role of stress in Gulf War illness, but not until forced by legislation in 1996 did it begin funding studies on the effects of low-level chemicals exposure. Three such studies had previously been denied funds.

Responding to the congressional report, Gilroy of DOD says that “in the last year we have done a lot of work and I don't know if any of it is reflected in [the House report]”. The work referred to is that done by the DOD's Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses, set up in November 1996 to oversee DOD research.

And the VA says the report fails to “recognize the openness and public accountability of the existing research effort”. Also, says a VA spokesman, Terry Jemison, VA research undergoes vetting to protect it from political influence.

Despite all these protestations, the lead author of the congressional report, Congressman Christopher Shays (Republican, Connecticut), has promised to draft legislation early in 1998 removing investigative powers from the DOD and VA.