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Shays committee targets government bungling of Gulf War illness studies
Insight on the News, March 16, 1998 by Keith Russell, James P. Lucier
Even as the world held its breath about whether Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would permit inspection of possible chemical and biological manufacturing sites, the House subcommittee on Government Reform and Oversight, headed by Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, began hearings in late February on the government's ability to deal with chemical-instigated illnesses in the military.
In November, the Shays committee issued a blistering report on the failure of all agencies of the executive branch even to consider solid evidence of persistent poisoning from chemical and biological agents in the Persian Gulf War (See news alert!, Nov. 24, 1997).
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Now Shays is going to go at the executive branch again. In subcommittee documents obtained by Insight, the plan of the chairman is to find out from the hearings whether the government's plan for investigation -- the so-called epidemiological studies -- is likely to produce valid results.
Even though the veterans' problems began to emerge in the early 1990s, most of the government's research did not get started until 1994. Four-fifths of the studies are not yet complete, and many won't be finished until after 2000.
The subcommittee also notes that the research program "has not included an assessment of the clinical progress of ill Gulf War veterans."
Shays also is calling for the government to abide by commonly accepted principles of scientific research -- that the internal reports be submitted for publication in peer-reviewed scientific literature, that proposals be open to the scientific community at large and that funding follow the recommendations of qualified medical and scientific experts.
Such objective scrutiny has been absent from past government attempts to discover the cause of these symptoms.
The subcommittee continues to criticize the fixation of the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs upon psychological explanation resulting from stress, rather than upon possible delayed, chronic neurotoxic effects from exposure to low-level chemical agents. It notes that the government scarcely did any studies at all on physical rather than psychological causes until Congress forced it to do so by legislation in 1996.
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