# Gulf War syndrome **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 23, 2000, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946 "2000-12-23T01:49:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/21 "2000-12-27T23:38:25Z")
**Kricket,** I am 100% with you. My mother has fibromyalgia and my stepmother has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. These are not “hysteria” or “after” anything. It was a tremendous relief to both ladies, both of them normal, sane, non-hysterical people, to finally be able to put a name to what was wrong with them. Until the early part of the 20th century, there was no such thing as “Alzheimer’s”. Old people just got senile and that was all there was to it. [http://www.alzheimers.com/health\_library/basics/basics\_06\_history.html](http://www.alzheimers.com/health_library/basics/basics_06_history.html) Before the 1980s, there was no such thing as Toxic Shock Syndrome. [http://www.mckinley.uiuc.edu/health-info/womenhlt/tox-shoc.html](http://www.mckinley.uiuc.edu/health-info/womenhlt/tox-shoc.html) [http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol1no3/stevens.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol1no3/stevens.htm) Like **DavidB** said, it doesn’t matter whether the person has a psychological problem or a physical problem–there’s still something wrong that needs to be fixed. Here are some pages of Web links for Gulf War Syndrome. [http://www.healthlinkusa.com/Gulf\_War\_Syndrome.htm](http://www.healthlinkusa.com/Gulf_War_Syndrome.htm) [http://dir.yahoo.com/Health/Diseases\_and\_Conditions/Gulf\_War\_Syndrome/](http://dir.yahoo.com/Health/Diseases_and_Conditions/Gulf_War_Syndrome/) [http://www.gulfweb.org/doc\_show.cfm?ID=459](http://www.gulfweb.org/doc_show.cfm?ID=459) ---
**Author:** ![jb\_farley](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9d8465/32.png) [@jb\_farley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jb_farley)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/22 "2000-12-27T23:58:08Z")
**Duck** , two things. First, ‘hysteria’ does not mean one is acting ‘hysterical’ or hyperemotive or irrationally. True, the word should be discarded (both for etymological and sociolinguistical reasons), but we’re stuck with it. If someone is suffering from hysteria, they are not “after” anything. They don’t have to be ‘crazy’ or ‘irrational’. They are simply (ha!) manifesting symptoms which don’t have a physical cause, due to some unknown societal pressure. Saying someone is suffering from hysteria should not be considered a slur or a comment on their mental health (unfortunately, the former and latter are often the same). And T.S.S. didn’t exist mainly because we didn’t have hyperabsorbant tampons which dessicated vaginal tissue, which were meant to be kept in for long periods of time, and which as a result became breeding grounds for bacteria. Diseases really can appear out of the blue, whether for physical, microbial, or psychological reasons. jb ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/23 "2000-12-28T01:58:39Z")
Here are some other sites on related issues: [Gulf War Syndrome](http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/gws.html) [Index to “Fad” Diagnoses](http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/fadindex.html) [Be Wary of “Fad” Diagnoses](http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/fad.html) ---
**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/24 "2000-12-28T15:44:43Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by jb\_farley \* > Diseases really can appear out of the blue, whether for physical, microbial, or psychological reasons. > \*\* Exactly. 🙂 I remember the early days of the Toxic Shock Syndrome thing, being a tampon user. There was a sizeable portion of “oh, come on!” skepticism in the media. Some feminists initially dismissed it as a patently false Dead White European Male conspiracy to pick on girls because they had to bleed every month. [http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9903/01/gulf.syndrome.01/](http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9903/01/gulf.syndrome.01/) > [@](#): > > ATLANTA (CNN) – Scientists, doctors and politicians are gathering in Atlanta for a conference focusing on ailments suffered by as many as 100,000 veterans of the Persian Gulf war, illnesses which have gone unexplained since the war ended eight years ago. > > The three-day conference, organized by the Centers for Disease Control, was called to develop a blueprint for researching Gulf War Syndrome, and to try to determine whether symptoms are linked to chemical weapons, biological agents, or to any particular disease. [http://www.hhs.gov/progorg/asl/testify/t000202a.html](http://www.hhs.gov/progorg/asl/testify/t000202a.html) > [@](#): > > Testimony on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses by Drue H. Barrett, Ph.D. > Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects > National Center for Environmental Health > Centers for Disease Control and Prevention > U.S. Public Health Service > U.S. Department of Health and Human Services > > Before the House Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans’ Affairs and International Relations > February , 2000 > > An intensive research effort to address Gulf War veterans’ health concerns has been mounted by federal agencies and non-governmental scientists. As of 1999, there have been 145 federally-funded research projects on Gulf War veterans’ illnesses with a cumulative expenditure of $133.5 million for research from FY94 through FY99. These projects represent a broad spectrum of research efforts, ranging from small pilot studies to large-scale epidemiology studies addressing mechanistic, clinical, and epidemiological issues. Similar efforts have been initiated in other coalition countries, most notably in the United Kingdom and Canada. In addition, numerous review panels and expert committees have evaluated the available data on Gulf War veterans’ illnesses. As noted in the GAO report, despite these extensive research and review efforts, many questions remain regarding the health impact of the Gulf War. However, these remaining questions do not reflect scientific indifference; instead they reflect the complexity of assessing and predicting the health impact of military deployments. Despite this complexity, the federal research effort continues in an effort to uncover the causes of illnesses among Gulf War veterans so that effective treatment approaches can be developed and similar illnesses in future deployments can be prevented. From **David’s** “Index to Fad Diagnoses” link: All Stephen Barrett, M.D.'s list is, is syndromes that, at the moment, are “Not Scientifically Defined or Recognized”. > [@](#): > > These alleged conditions differ greatly from those of medically recognized diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and coronary heart disease, each of which is associated with a clear-cut history, physical findings, and laboratory tests. With these, however, the range of symptoms is virtually endless and typically does not correlate with physical findings or science-based laboratory tests. The other diseases in Dr. Barrett’s “Index to Fad Diseases” are: Candidiasis hypersensitivity Cavitational osteopathosis: Also called neuralgia-inducing cavitational osteonecrosis Electrical hypersensitivity Gulf War syndrome Leaky gut syndrome Mercury-amalgam toxicity Multiple chemical sensitivity Sick building syndrome Wilson’s Syndrome AFAIK, none of these is getting anywhere near the media attention, not to mention the research funding, that Gulf War Syndrome is. The only one I’ve even heard of is “sick building syndrome”. I don’t know who Dr. Stephen Barrett is, but I do know who the Centers for Disease Control is (are?) And if the CDC says, of Gulf War Syndrome, “there’s something there, but we don’t know what it is,” then that’s good enough for me. And yes, I do understand that a large portion of the Gummint’s unease regarding GWS probably has to do with “assessing and predicting the health impact of military deployments”. Gotta love the Pentagon! :rolleyes: If “sick building syndrome” were affecting the deployment of American G.I.s, I know, it’d make your head spin, how fast the research money would come pouring out of the pipeline. But–there aren’t thousands and thousands of people insisting that they _are, too,_ sick with “sick building syndrome”. And sufferers from “sick building syndrome” haven’t been making speeches, and appearing on _Good Morning America,_ and stumping their elected representatives, for nearly 10 years now. I don’t think you can just write _all_ that off as fashionable “Disease of the Month” media attention. I know we’re not supposed to keep our minds so open that things fall out, but can’t we keep just an attic window open maybe? Do you think **Kricket** doesn’t know when there’s something wrong with her husband? When you get sick or injure yourself, how do you like it when people tell you, “It’s all in your head”? ---
**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/25 "2000-12-28T16:04:20Z")
It’s taken them 30 years to figure out that vitamins are important in pregnancy, and it’s taken them 15 years to figure out just the spina bifida/folic acid connection. [Overview of spina bifida and folic acid.](http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/gum-heartdisease/spinabifida.html) [The CDC report on spina bifida and folic acid.](http://aepo-xdv-www.epo.cdc.gov/wonder/prevguid/m0019479/m0019479.htm) Ten years for Gulf War Syndrome? Pfui, ten years is nothing. ---
**Author:** ![peace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c68b51/32.png) [@peace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/peace)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/26 "2000-12-28T16:05:54Z")
Duck, you did a good job researching and gave a good analysis. The government, in my view, cannot be accused in stonewalling anything, they genuinely try to do something in this case. M$ for many years could not straighten (simple) SW issues; human body is more complex. TSS was a good example, although, strange as it was, it looked like a real disease from the beginning (at least, to me). I wish we dealt with problems as they are, without the hordes of greedy lawyers. Peace ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/27 "2000-12-28T16:41:36Z")
Look. You go off to the gulf war. Later you get sick. But does that mean that one caused the other. I don’t see how you can accuse the gov’t of “stonewalling”. They investigated, others investigated. No one can explain “Gulf War Syndrome”, or even be sure it exists. How can you expect doctors to treat a disease that may or may not exist and has no known cause or cure? GWS seems to me to be related to Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. People with MCS get sick in response to “chemicals”…or do they? If you expose sufferers to doses of chemicals they claim make them sick, they don’t get sick. They do get sick when they _know_ they have been exposed to the chemicals. I’m not saying that people with MCS aren’t really sick, they are. But their problem has nothing to do with chemicals, it seems more like obsessive-compulsive disorder. Humans are pattern seeking creatures. This often works well, and we discover a hidden cause of events. But we sometimes discover patterns where none exists. So we see faces in clouds, or believe in astrology, or “luck”. And sometimes we believe in diseases that don’t exist. There are two types of errors here. One is not believing that a disease exists, when it really does exist. The other is believing in a disease when it does not exist. And a simple reading of medical literature reveals thousands of proposed diseases that did not, in fact, turn out to exist. And the so-called treatment of these non-existant diseases caused very real harm. The fact that people didn’t believe in Toxic Shock Syndrome is interesting, but so is the fact that they believed in migrating wombs. So it is not enough to say, “I am sick, I think this is the cause.” That is a starting point. But all the doctors investigating GWS can’t find a common element, they can’t find anything that all GWS sufferers were exposed to that all non-GWS people weren’t. We can’t say, “My husband is sick, there must be a cause.” We don’t know that. Maybe GWS is a real disease, but we are very far from deciding that, let alone explaining the course of the disease, let alone finding a cause, let alone finding treatment, let alone finding a cure. It is possible that some people became sick after being exposed to something in the gulf, others became sick after they returned from the gulf for other reasons, others are suffering from psychiatric problems, and others are not really sick. Or any combination of any of these explanations. Which one of these is the “real” gulf war syndrome? In the case of AIDS, it was decided that HIV was “real” AIDS. But, we know that some people with HIV don’t get sick, while other people who are not HIV positive have compromised immune systems. But most HIV+ people develop AIDS, while very few HIV- people do. So, we say that the people who develop compromised immune systems for reasons other than HIV infection have something other than AIDS, even though they develop the same symptoms HIV/AIDS patients do. So, this is really somewhat of a semantic question…but it is also a way of organizing thought. If we say that AIDS is caused by HIV, then we know what to do…prevent HIV infection and treat HIV infection with anti-viral therapy. So, if GWS is to be recognized as a “real” disease, we have to find a common cause. This is not to say that people who end up not having “GWS” weren’t really sick, but recognizing that they are sick with something else. Treating the wrong disease is not the answer. And it may turn out that no disease will ever be recognized as causing GWS. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t sick, just that what made them sick is different from what they thought. ---
**Author:** ![jb\_farley](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9d8465/32.png) [@jb\_farley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jb_farley)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/28 "2000-12-28T18:14:50Z")
**Duck** , nice research. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Gulf War Syndrome may not turn out to have a chemical or biological cause at some point. I’ve received two of the White House reports on Gulf War Syndrome, for a paper I did on that topic. My original thesis had been “There is no Gulf War Syndrome”, and that there was nothing statistically significant to symptoms. 3/4 of the way through the paper, I changed my mind and had to redo my outlines and resample my citiations. It’s just at this point, the aforementioned thesis and antithesis clashed, and out has popped the synthesis (yeah yeah, Hegel). There’s something there, without a doubt. I just now doubt if it’s not ‘simply’ psychological. Look at it this way (bad example of how GWS may occur, but good example of way contagious mental diseases may spread): Social anxiety disorder is now big in the media. There are commercials for drugs to treat it, medical reports on local newscasts, etc. It’s possible that incidence of the disease may rise. How? One possible mechanism is the mass attention paid to the disorder. The symptoms are listed in Readers Digest and McCalls. As a result, awareness is up. People look for symptoms in themselves (just as they would for cancer or heart attacks)- it stays in the back of their mind. This may make it more likely for some individuals to go from brief moments of panic, which many get intermittently (I’ve had a bunch myself), to a full fledged panic attack. Why? Because they are thinking about a panic attack while already panicked, and the psychic stress builds. It’s a chain reaction. I’d wager that a certain percentage of the population (much higher than those who actually manifest) could manifest SAD. Just as there are many people who may develop depression. All you need is a stressor. Attention paid could trigger a disease. It’s still a real disease, just as heart disease or cancer. The main difference is that the heart or the cells don’t respond to mental changes the way the brain can (duh- it’s a stupid sentence, but I can’t rewrite it right). And it may be false too. It’s very well possible that most diseases are utterly dependent on mental state (stress disposing the body to higher rates of cancerous cells, or infection). There’s a lot of preliminary research already out that points strongly in that direction. jb ---
**Author:** ![Needs2know](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b5e925/32.png) [@Needs2know](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Needs2know)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/29 "2000-12-28T20:14:34Z")
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t it take an awful long time for the government to discover that guys were sick from exposure to Agent Orange? Needs2know ---
**Author:** ![Kricket](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f14d63/32.png) [@Kricket](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kricket)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/30 "2000-12-28T22:17:49Z")
My husband doesn’t remember where he puts things, he doesn’t remember conversations. Forgetfulness or memory loss. You guys are good with this. Define both. Seriously I am asking if there is a difference. Or what the difference is. And his sleeping all the time isn’t a due to depression. We have already seen a psycologist on an unrelated topic. All I am saying is that something is up. He was told not to donate blood because he was a GW vet. All the test I went through when I was pregnant because he was a vet. We weren’t together at the time that he was in, so I don’t know what he went through, but wouldn’t one reason why some are saying they are sick and some aren’t is because they had different a mos. Some were close to the ammo dumps and some weren’t. Like I said, he is a typical man and won’t talk about it. Nothing is wrong. And if it was the shots they were given that could be due to different tolerance levels? I went to school with a girl and her father came in contact with agent orange. Every child in the family had some form of birth defect, and now there childrens birth defects are worse than theirs. But that is off the topic. ---
**Author:** ![jb\_farley](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9d8465/32.png) [@jb\_farley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jb_farley)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/31 "2000-12-28T23:21:34Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Needs2know \* > \*\*Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t it take an awful long time for the government to discover that guys were sick from exposure to Agent Orange? > > Needs2know \*\* I think it was less a matter of the government discovering it than of the government admitting it. Either way, it took time. The difference between Agent Orange and GWS is kind of obvious. On one hand, we knew what the chemical causative was, and therefore could easily study the symptoms. On the other, we have a large listing of symptoms with a number of putative causes. jb ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2000, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/32 "2000-12-29T02:02:20Z")
Duck Duck Goose said: > [@](#): > > And if the CDC says, of Gulf War Syndrome, “there’s something there, but we don’t know what it is,” then that’s good enough for me. The problem is that nobody is arguing against the statement that “there’s something there.” However, that “something” may very well be psychological, not physiological, in nature. ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2000, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/33 "2000-12-29T02:07:15Z")
Incidentally, since somebody brought up Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, here is a link to a summary of Barrett’s book on the topic, [Chemical Sensitivity: The Truth about Environmental Illness](http://www.quackwatch.com/04ConsumerEducation/BookContents/cscon.html) ---
**Author:** ![peace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c68b51/32.png) [@peace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/peace)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2000, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946/34 "2000-12-29T02:26:39Z")
Kricket, by no means I am an expert on AO, but if birth defects run in the second generation, if I get it correctly: **and now there childrens birth defects are worse than theirs** , I doubt that AO is the culprit. And what do you mean “worse”? As far as your husband: memory loss (if you are sure that it is real; he is getting older, remember?) can be due to a thousand reasons. The difference between trivial forgetfulness and Alzheimer’s is in that joke. If you are seriously concerned, have him to see a psychiatrist or at least a psychologist. There are good tests, which will allow differentiating between memory problems. If he has sleep problems, I would suggest a psychiatrist (M.D.). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gulf-war-syndrome/46946.md?page=1)