Word: gulf
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...Gist: If you don't want your kid to join the military, have them read the latest report on the health of Gulf War veterans, released by a congressionally mandated panel earlier this week. The 465-page study details how the U.S. military mistakenly poisoned its own soldiers with two chemicals during Operation Desert Storm, leading to a number of debilitating symptoms - from chronic muscle pain and digestive problems to memory loss and persistent skin lesions - now collectively known as Gulf War illness (GWI). Worse still, the panel found that millions of dollars in funding for GWI research had been...
...Highlight Reel:1. On GWI's elusive nature: The illness has confounded scientists since 1991, when an unusually large number of Gulf War veterans began reporting a bizarre range of symptoms. As the Committee explains, "Gulf War illness does not fit neatly into our current concepts of disease. The underlying pathobiology of Gulf War illness is not apparent from routine clinical tests, and the illness appears not to be the result of a single cause producing a well-known effect." While the military insisted for years that GWI was another form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the panel concluded...
...faced on the ground, including "hundreds of burning oil-well fires that turned the Kuwaiti sky black with smoke, dramatic reports of uranium-tipped munitions, sandstorms, secret vaccines, and frequent chemical alarms, along with the government's acknowledgement of nerve-agent releases in theater ... Studies have also indicated that Gulf War veterans developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) [also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease] at twice the rate of nondeployed veterans, and that those stationed downwind from the Khamisiyah munitions demolitions have died from brain cancer at twice the rate of other Gulf War veterans...
...lack of research and the misuse of federal funds: Since 1994, the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs have spent nearly $440 million on Gulf War research, or so the agencies said. The panel found that much of the money had been used to fund research wholly unrelated to GWI. In fact, a great deal of the DOD's "Gulf War portfolio" consisted of projects for currently deployed soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the DOD has slashed funding for Gulf War research from nearly $30 million annually to less...
...that sometimes a soldier's greatest enemy is the government he or she is fighting for. As the panel notes, it took nearly 20 years before the U.S. admitted that its use of Agent Orange had adversely affected soldiers during Vietnam, and it's taken just as long for Gulf War veterans to get GWI recognized as an actual medical condition. As the report's authors state, "addressing the serious and persistent health problems that affect Gulf War veterans as a result of their military service remains the obligation of the federal government and all who are indebted...