Mon 06 Dec 2004

Syndrome revealed

MARGARET COOK

VETERANS of the 1991 Gulf War who became ill as a result of their service, both in the US and the UK, were treated with shameful neglect and even calumny by their respective governments.

They were dismissed as trouble-makers, labelled liars and told their symptoms were all in the mind. They were made, they said, to feel like the enemy. The broad spectrum of malaise was termed Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), but successive governments have refused to recognise that it exists.

One tenet to which those governments clung on in the face of all logic - supported in the UK by the medical establishment - was that the complaints were too diffuse and wide-ranging to be attributable to a single cause. This makes no medical sense as any medical student knows. Multi-system diseases can present in multiple ways; just look at AIDS.

Even the name Gulf War Syndrome was denied to sufferers, under the cynical concern that it might be a handle to facilitate compensation claims.

Both here and in the US there seems to have been a programme of official obstruction to any research into causes; other than the theories of post-combat fatigue in those individuals lacking the regulation stiff upper lip. But the truth will out, and at last, after 13 years, two prestigious reports were published last month which are impossible to ignore.

In the UK, Lord Lloyd’s independent and privately-funded inquiry, in which the government refused to participate, has concluded the syndrome is genuine and was indeed caused by combat service. The US report not only rubbishes the stress theories, but provides more concrete evidence that multiple low-level toxins - sarin, depleted uranium, organophosphates, heavy metals and oils, multiple vaccines and nerve-toxin antidotes - which the troops were regularly exposed to in the Gulf, are capable of causing damage to the immune system and brain and nerve tissues.

Such damage is difficult to demonstrate in a living patient, and an imperative now is to develop reliable diagnostic tests, such as some form of brain imaging.

Professor Malcolm Hooper, one of the witnesses to the Lloyd Inquiry, considered that the history of GWS reads as an "orchestrated, coherent and comprehensive attempt to construct an understanding of Gulf War Syndrome as a psychiatric and psychological dysfunction commonly found in soldiers returning from the battlefield".

Besides giving hope to GWS sufferers, other marginalised ranks of sick people may raise their heads with hope and a sense of déjà vu. For there are a number of other conditions with astonishing similarity to GWS, not only in their clinical features, but also in their treatment by the both medical and political establishments.

I refer to ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), the array of chronic fatigue syndromes (CFS) and organophosphate poisoning, to name just some. It is easy to see how these can be hijacked by psychiatrists, who have talked of "illness beliefs" and actively discouraged physical investigation. Indeed, there is much the same dismissive language as has been used for GWS sufferers, and a similar relentless opposition to officially name each condition.