01:09 AM CDT on Tuesday, June 29, 2004
With the handover of authority Monday in Iraq, the second Gulf War
is in a new stage. However, tens of thousands of veterans from the last Gulf War have
been living in limbo for a decade. They're sick, but nobody knows why
- yet there now is a potential breakthrough on the illness that's come
to be known as Gulf War Syndrome. At the center of this breakthrough is a video taken south of Baghdad
near a town called Khamisiyah in March 1991. The clip is scratchy and
jumpy, but for thousands of sick veterans, it contains the most
important pictures of the first Gulf War. In the video, Army engineers blow up one of Saddam Hussein's ammunition
dumps. Unknown to them, some of it contains the deadly nerve gas sarin.
As the explosion clouds spread skyward, the plume of dust and nerve
gas exposes 100,000 - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of U.S. troops
to the extremely toxic chemical agent. During a recent hearing in Washington, an Army Major General admitted
something the military has denied for years: that there could be a
disease from serving in the Gulf, caused by exposure to sarin. It's
the disease others call Gulf War Syndrome. "Yes, there may be some soldiers from the Gulf War that were affected
because of a low-level exposure to sarin," the Major General told a
committee at a hearing on the matter. "I think it is quite plausible, quite believable, that there is
damage from low-level exposure to nerve agents, and that can be a basis
of, in fact, multiple diseases and nerve dysfunction," said Dr. Jonathan
Perlin of the Veterans Administration. As troops moved across Iraq during the first Gulf War, bombing and
demolition destroyed a total of four ammo dumps that contained sarin.
The Department of Defense estimates that the plumes from those
explosions rose hundreds of feet into the air, but new models from the
General Accounting Office said the plumes may have gone much higher,
and blown over troops throughout the southern theater of the war.
For years, epidemiologist Dr. Robert Haley of UT Southwestern Medical
Center in Dallas has been alone in saying Gulf War Syndrome exists.
At the hearings in Washington, other scientists took his side. His
research indicates that some people have an enzyme that protects them
from nerve gas, while others do not. Also, he said different people suffer different symptoms from low-level
exposure. "When this nerve cloud came over the troops and rained fallout and
they were all exposed, (it was) absorbed through the skin through breathing
and so forth," Haley said. "The ones who had high levels of this enzyme
in their blood from birth just fought it off - it destroyed it so
it didn't hurt them - but the ones who were born with low levels of
paraoxonase, the nerve gas was able to go right into their blood."
During the first Gulf War, numerous nerve gas detection alarms went
off in several places. As estimates of the height of the gas plume
have grown, the Department of Defense has raised its estimate of the
number of soldiers exposed from zero to 300 to 5,000 to 98,000, and
now to 101,000. Experts said that number is low. "700,000 soldiers, including people in Kuwait, including civilian
populations in Saudi Arabia, may have - repeat, may have - been
exposed," said Keith Rhodes of the General Accounting Office. "There is a tipping point now both in the science, and in the reason
for taking action," said Jim Binns of the Research Advisory Committee
on Gulf War Illnesses. Taking action will be expensive. Once the government admits veterans
actually have a disease, it will have to compensate them, and that
will cost money. The government has already spent $240 million to determine whether
Gulf War Syndrome is a disease. That's small consolation to the veterans
who could have used that money for treatment.