Are Gulf Vets Really Sicker? (continued)
Nearly 200,000 Gulf War veterans are suffering from Gulf War Syndrome. Some estimates are that 20,000 American service personnel have died due to the Gulf War Syndrome. What are we doing about this? How are we helping these vets? Please join me now as we continue our in-depth original investigative reporting series Gulf War Syndrome Killing Our Own.
We have discussed up to this point about why the Pentagon, the Defense Department, the State Department, the CIA, the White House, and the Veterans' Affairs have refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the complaints of these hundreds of thousands of Gulf War vets, and the thousands who have died from their illnesses. These soldiers' complaints have to be taken seriously. There has been no major effort by the government to understand what is going on. We understand. We believe these vets have real diseases and real physical ailments, and we believe they have real causes. The soldiers would like to hear a public acknowledgement of what caused their illnesses and would like a government official to say," here's your treatment and compensation." This has not been done. It is my hope that when more of this information filters out into the larger population people will begin to examine it and hold the appropriate agencies accountable.
Problems in the design of studies and the way the data was analysed has led to the dragging of feet in the conclusions drawn in the case of Gulf War Illness.
The science also seems to indicate that what was given to the soldiers before their service, may have caused a certain chemical sensitivity on the ground: In a particular test called the 'ordinary least squares analysis', vets who reported chemical exposure on the ground were also correlated to a certain degree with those who had also ingested pyridostigmine bromide tablets.
A year 2003 study showed biases in the demographics of those who actually reported having been exposed to nerve gas: "… females, nonwhites, and those who were older (age 32 to 61 years) were more likely to report exposure"… to "non-nerve or mustard gas," "potentially toxic agents and traumatic events," "reported more physical symptoms during the Gulf War," "and reported poorer current health status." Despite the fact that the article seems to point to targeting this demographic when there is a public health event such as a war, I believe the article needs also to urge the treatment of all who return from combat; previous citations in this article seem to point out the lack of proper medical diagnosis and treatment of all Gulf Vets, including the younger, male demographic not mentioned here:
A study of male veterans deployed to the Gulf and non Gulf states showed that Gulf War veterans suffered more illnesses than other veterans: "The Gulf War cohort reported symptoms and disorders significantly more frequently than those in the Bosnia and Era cohorts, ... perception of physical health and ability were significantly worse in the Gulf War cohort than in the other cohorts…Gulf War veterans were more likely than the Bosnia cohort to have substantial fatigue …, symptoms of post-traumatic stress …and psychological … and were nearly twice as likely to reach the CDC case definition ." This article points out the need to make sure Gulf vets are examined closely for possible illness vectors that are not present in the environments of the vets serving in other areas of the world.
Rather than looking for ways to help the soldiers who report illness, some science seems directed towards discrediting them:
A year 2004 Elsevier paper found that reports which measure symptoms for anthrax exposure are biased towards soldiers who self report symptoms from exposure; it seems to imply that folks who did not report symptoms for anthrax exposure were not checked carefully against the government reports, and when checked against these reports, there was no statistical difference between reported anthrax exposure and symptoms of exposure. In other words, saying that there were some soldiers actually exposed to anthrax did not actually come down with symptoms, so there was no correlation between reported exposure and soldiers having subsequent symptoms of illness.
However, if soldiers reported symptoms of exposure, the prevailing attitude should be one of trusting that their reports had some basis; as we know from our own domestic experience with anthrax terrorism, everyone is not exposed to anthrax comes down with the same severity of illness. Another study discusses the treatment of fibromyalgia syndrome, noted as a possible contributor to Gulf War Illness, with the examination of thyroid function, noting that fibromyalgia may cause thyroid resistance as a result of hormonal disruption.
Missing Log Pages...and Credibility
In the previous sections of this paper we talked about the different exposures that the vets have had. We're also going to look at something that would not be tolerated anywhere else in our society: missing logs. How is it that agency after agency can lose tens of thousands of records? Surely someone should be responsible for this delinquency. No person has been held responsible even though tens of thousands of government logs are missing, and they're only the logs that specifically show that our soldiers were exposed to various experimental vaccines, including squalene, or that they were exposed to chemical agents in the theater of operations.
Echoes of Watergate seemed to resound in December '96, when it was revealed that military records from a 7-day period right after Gulf War I (Mar. 4-10, 1991) were reported lost by the Pentagon. It was within this time frame that the Kamisiyah arms depot was blown up. Many photographes showed that they came from the United States; and most of these were just detonated. As a result, alarms went off all over the area, but no one was protected. No one had on the right gear. There were biological weapons in that detonated material. The Pentagon had denied this too. Former Senate investigator James Tuite voiced the skepticism of many when he said, "This was the historical record of what was supposedly the brightest moment in the last 50 years of American military history, and now they say they've misplaced part of the historical record?" Subsequent information (from March 1997) provided by the Pentagon estimates that 80 percent of the logs are missing. According to the Department of Defense, they had managed to track down only 36 pages of the known 200 pages of log material. The 36 pages show repeated warnings that Iraqi chemical weapons were detected, but these were all called false at the time by commanders. The logs for the destruction of Kamisiyah were still missing. 
Tuite did get some information recently that shed light on Kamisiyah, through the Freedom of Information Act. He obtained a report given to the Air Force by the Livermore National Laboratory three months before the First Gulf War. The essence of this was that bombing Iraq's arsenals would release deadly nerve agents that could endanger our troops, given the direction of prevailing winds. This means that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of troops could be affected. The Livermore predictions had been kept under wraps for seven years, and never made public.
"This latest bombshell is no surprise," commented Representative Christopher Shays (R., Connecticut), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Resources. In other words, cover-up is par for the governmental course.
So are outspoken doctors who end up losing their jobs. This is an issue that keeps surfacing. Indeed, in December 1996, the leader of a Congressional investigation into Gulf vets' illnesses accused the Department of Veterans Affairs of trying to rid that agency of doctors who questioned official government positions. According to Representative Shays, the veterans' agency threatened to fire doctors who gave voice to the ideas that exposure to chemical agents in the Gulf made Americans sick, or that there was an infectious agent endemic to the region responsible for our soldiers' illnesses. For instance, Dr. Katherine Murray Leisure, one of the first doctors to notice a pattern of health problems among Gulf vets, was informed that she was to lose her job. It took protests from veterans' groups and members of Congress to rescind her firing temporarily. A half year later she did lose her job.
"This is a very dark era for federal medicine," Dr. Leisure said. "It's a new disease with new problems combined with chemical warfare, biological warfare, and unknown agents in the desert. But federal officials think that the enemy is the veterans and the people who are trying to help them."
Dr. William Baumzweiger, who testified in Congress that low doses of Iraqi nerve gas probably led to veterans' ailments, was another physician slated for dismissal and then saved, through protests by Congress people who had heard his testimony. Representative Shays said: "If you have a contrary view that maybe the Congress or the public needs to hear, you are silenced." 
Evidence of American troops' exposure to nerve gas in Gulf War I led Nobel-prize-winning scientist Dr. Joshua Lederberg to call a new study to determine if low-level nerve gas exposure can lead to long-term disease. This was the same Dr. Lederberg who headed a 1994 Pentagon study that said there was no chemical weapons link with Gulf War syndrome, but the information that came out on Kamisiyah made him take a second look. Lederberg is also paying attention to recent reports by Israeli scientists that anti-nerve-gas agents given to allied troops during the Gulf conflict may be having physical repercussions today.
Issues of credibility became important in illuminating December 1996 Congressional testimony from two American soldiers who had served in the Gulf War. Major Michael F. Johnson and Gunnery Sergeant George J. Grass, of the Army and the Marines, respectively, had worked in a Fox during the war, which is the kind of vehicle that functions as a chemical-detector lab. They reported that chemical weapons were found in Kuwait, both during and after the war. This directly contradicted the Pentagon's previous line about false alarms and no chemical weapons present in Kuwait. The soldiers' chemical detections were ignored at the time, and Sergeant Grass noted that many of the chemical-agent shells spotted appeared to be American-made.
If the Pentagon admitted that there were chemical agents being exposed in the theater of operations someone might have asked where they came from. If it were shown that we, the Americans, had made some of these chemical and biological agents, then people would ask, 'is that is against the Geneva Convention and other conventions on biological testing?' The answer would be yes. So in order not to implicate ourselves in having broken all these international laws, we simply deny that there was any biological or chemical warfare exposure in spite of all the proof to the contrary.
Also providing riveting testimony at the 1996 hearing was Major Randy Hebert, a Marine suffering from amylotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), a condition he suspects is linked to low-level chemical exposure during his Gulf service. Hebert's words, which, because of his condition, had to be translated by family members, were to the effect that the Pentagon did not want to accept its responsibility for sick veterans. 
Other news from the end of 1996 was that Britain joined the U.S., the Czech Republic, and Slovakia in expanding its inquiry into the conditions plaguing coalition forces. Our Department of Veterans Affairs said it was slow in investigating vets' health complaints because of previous false assurances by the Pentagon that no chemical weapons exposure had occurred. An ex-investigator who was fired was working with the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses. He said he'd been told to limit his investigation to government agencies. Dr. Jonathan B. Tucker had been instructed that actual Gulf War veterans were off-limits as information sources in the committee's investigation of veterans' illnesses! Also off-limits were government whistle-blowers.
Now think of that for a moment. You're on a Presidential panel. You've been selected to look at all the information, all the scientific evidence, hear from all the experts, and determine if these hundreds of thousands of Gulf Vets who are complaining that they have these really serious illnesses are legitimate. If they are legitimate, you're to find out what were the causes, and what can be done to help them. Yet, you're told you can't speak with the vets. You can't speak with anyone who has inside information that these vets may have been exposed to chemical and biological weapons or the depleted uranium, or the vaccines, or the pesticides used in their uniforms, or the toxic oil well fires. You can't talk with any of them.
First of all, what kind of individuals would allow themselves to look at only official government agencies' reports that are going to deny that there was any problem? Hence, they all come up with the idea that it was psychosomatic. It's all in their heads. That's the problem. That's the frustration.
Regarding the number of Americans exposed to gas at the Kamisiyah demolition, the Pentagon estimate seems to have topped off at 100,045, up from the few hundred of mid-1996! From 1100 to 100,000 is an awfully big reach, but that's what it came out to. So we had 100,000 vets in Iraq who were exposed to biological and chemical weapons, and yet none of the committees were allowed to know this. In December 1996, when the number had reached 20,000 a panel reported that we will probably never know how many Americans were exposed, due to uncertainty about weather conditions at the time, as well as other factors. The New York Times noted: "The news release was made available at the Pentagon late on Friday afternoon, too late for television networks to include it in their evening broadcast, and without any notification to news organization that routinely cover the department. It is the latest in a series of incidents in which the Pentagon has released bad news about this and other issues late on a Friday afternoon or in the evening." 
Preliminary Panel Report
By January 1997, about 80,000 of our original 700,000 Gulf veterans had requested special medical examinations specific to Gulf-related illness. At that point, governmental response to this large segment of our Gulf service population was a White House panel report saying that the group could find no evidence that exposure to chemical weapons hurt soldiers' health. (Now mind you this is under Bill Clinton. So he had personal responsibility.) But that's like saying, as was said for years, that there's no evidence cigarette smoke causes cancer. You have to know how to find such evidence because it's going to involve statistical correlation over long periods of time, rather than easy, short-term experimentation. You can't exclude people who have that evidence, and that's exactly what was done. In essence the entire panel ended up in a cover-up.
At the time, the panel mentioned stress as a contributing factor to veterans' ailments. But as John D. Rockefeller IV put it, "it's not just a stress syndrome." Rockefeller underscored the fact that there are 50,000 or more people who went over to the Gulf completely healthy and came back "very, very sick," and he complained of the "massive indifference of the whole military establishment." 
On the plus side, the report did also say that the Pentagon's long-standing reluctance to research the health effects of low-level chemical agent exposure had done the country a disservice. And it called for more investigation of other possible Gulf syndrome factors, such as oil-well fires and pesticides. Other early 1997 news came from Senator Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They reported that Iowa's Gulf veterans were indeed sicker than that state's other veterans. 
A later act, The Persian Gulf War Act of 1998, as opposed to earlier legislation, recognized that, Gulf War vets' "service, as opposed to exposure to unknown agent(s), is a risk factor for development of certain conditions experienced by Persian Gulf veterans."
So everyone thought that under the leadership of Representative Lane Evans, we now have something that will protect the Gulf vets. Not so. It was simply ignored by the Veterans Administration, despite the fact that the plight of Gulf vets was starting to be recognized by some in the media, some in the scientific community, but almost no one in government.
A February 27, 1998 memo by Representative Lane Evans describes the Persian Gulf Veterans Act of 1998, "This legislation provides VA a scientific foundation on which to base its decisions about compensation and, at the same time, provides veterans assurance that VA is basing their compensation decisions upon science that exists today."
Despite the fact that the plight of Gulf vets is starting to be recognized by the government, some of the illnesses that the vets contract are chronic neurological disorders that that the mainstream medical community still has difficulty treating:
"In September 2005, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that, "of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in 1991, a disproportionate number experienced serious neurological disorders." Whereas nationally, 1 in 700 people suffers from MS (.1%), the Post-Intelligencer reports that 3 in 36 (8%) soldiers who served near battalion in Iraq have been diagnosed with MS, and one is suffering from an undiagnosed condition."
But there is also something else that has to be recognized, and that is the power of synergy.
The Power of Synergy
More and more truths are being acknowledged about the Gulf War syndrome picture, and one of the most important is that our troops were exposed not just to a single toxin, but they were exposed to a whole variety. We learn from this that we can't lose sight of the power of synergy. That is, when two or more relatively weak illness-causing factors are combined, together they can be quite harmful. This was underscored by a January 1997 paper by researchers who had studied both experimental animals and Gulf War vets at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Their findings were that otherwise harmless levels of two or more chemicals can combine to cause precisely the symptoms reported by Gulf War syndrome sufferers. These symptoms appear to be a type of organophosphate poisoning, report the researchers. What's more, they note that the subtle nerve damage caused by organophosphate poisoning can be missed by physicians unfamiliar with the phenomenon. 
Dr. Robert W. Haley, head of epidemiology at Southwestern Medical Center and leader of the research team, spoke of the severe symptoms being experienced by a group of vets who had been at Khafji, near the Saudi-Kuwait border, on Jan. 20, 1991, during the air war. This was a day when Czech chemical experts had detected sarin and mustard gas. The hard-hit vets seem to have taken pyridostigmine nerve gas antidote tablets after, rather than before, chemical exposure, which can be particularly damaging.
Additional work done at the Southwestern Medical Center shows stronger evidence that chemical synergy, not stress, is what's making vets sick. Professor of clinical neurology Jim Hom was a principal investigator on this study. He explained that the researchers compared a broad range of brain-related psychological functions of ill and well veterans from the 24th Naval Mobile Construction Battalion. The scientists were ignorant as to which group was which until the end of the work so as not to bias the study.
"The ill veterans performed worse on 59 of the 71 brain-related measures," Hom reported, adding that the affected vets' psychological profile was similar to that of individuals with general medical problems and did not include psychopathology. "Clearly, the ill veterans demonstrated a neuropsychological pattern of impairment that is indicative of generalized brain damage, not psychological reactions." 
Now why is this important? It's because if they were suffering from this so-called mythical post traumatic stress syndrome, well they wouldn't have brain damage. They might have illusions, but not brain damage. These people had brain damage. They had neurological symptoms. They had fatigue. They had parasites, viruses, and bacteria in their bodies. That's not psychological. That's physical.
What was particularly noteworthy about Hom's study was that it refuted the results of an earlier study done at the Birmingham VA Medical Center by researchers who used many, but not all, of the same neuropsychological tests. In that study, 55 Gulf vets with cognitive difficulties were tested, and the VA researchers concluded that exposure to neurotoxins did not come into play, attributing the vets' symptoms to "intentional exaggeration of problems" or "emotional distress," and going as far as to say that some of the vets were faking.
But there was a problem with the Birmingham study, Hom explained: It had no control group. The Dallas study, by contrast, had a control group of veterans from the same unit who were not reporting any problems. "When you stack all the results of our tests together it is clear that something is wrong. The brain is an organ that integrates all types of functions. You can't isolate and test just one thing. The tests have to be complementary. Our tests were designed to be a package--they complemented each other. This is what makes our study different than others."
Thus, Hom discounts psychological disorders, including post traumatic stress disorder, as being responsible for the veterans' symptoms. Unfortunately, you don't hear from people like him. He says, rather, that affected vets suffer from one of three syndromes: The first is characterized by thought, memory, and sleep difficulties; the second by more significant thought problems, as well as by confusion and imbalance; and the third by joint and muscle soreness and by tingling and numbness in the hands and feet. And these three syndromes are variations of organophosphate-induced delayed polyneuropathy, which results from exposure to certain chemicals that inhibit cholinesterase, an enzyme necessary for proper nervous system functioning.
Hom's co-researcher Dr. Robert Haley commented, "This study supports our overall theory that the syndrome we identified represents neurological damage from combinations of chemicals."
And when asked about the psychological aspects of Gulf War syndrome, Hom said "Psychological issues are important--but they don't cause brain damage."
One article suggests that stress alone is not responsible for one of the neurological illnesses noticed in our vets: An interesting research article in 1993 at the University of Ramat Aviv, studied the effects of missile attacks on those who were in remission from Multiple Sclerosis but serving in the region during Gulf War I. The conclusion stated, "The number of relapses of MS during the war and the following 2 months was significantly lower than expected based on the frequency during the preceding 2 years, suggesting that not all stress conditions increase the risk of exacerbations in MS.
The literature is starting to reflect the suspected connection between Gulf War Illness and mycoplasma infection.
A review of literature on the host effectiveness of mycoplasma and bacteria points out that mycoplasmas are prokaryotic, or very simple bacteria that survive by being parasitic off of the nutrients of more complex cells, (such as animal and human cells) and they can also live within our cells—intracellularly.
Bacterial infections have been shown to be associated with a host of illnesses:
"Invasive bacterial infections are associated with several acute and chronic illnesses, including: aerodigestive diseases such as Asthma, Pneumonia, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases; rheumatoid diseases, such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA); immunosuppression diseases such as HIV-AIDS; genitourinary infections and chronic fatigue illnesses such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) and Gulf War Illnesses (GWI)." The article points out that mycoplasma may actually cause these infections; it may be a causative factor in immune dysfunction, which leads to these illnesses, or opportunistic infection as part of a greater illness.
These are the very conditions that the Gulf War veterans are suffering from so we do have a cause and effect.
The following data provide evidence that is suggestive of mycoplasma in Gulf War Patients:
A study in Norway in 2003 suggests that most people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome recover after long term treatment with doxycycline and the infection can not be detected after recovery." This report states, "mycoplasma blood infection has been detected in about 50% of patients with CFS and/or FMS, including patients with Gulf War illnesses and symptoms that overlap with one or both syndromes."" The same article also points out that CFS/FMS , and Gulf War Illness, which overlaps with both of them, are difficult to diagnose in the laboratory.
Some disagreement, however, seems to be present in the literature about the clinical effectiveness of doxycycline:
A 2004 study in Massachusetts on the effects of doxycycline on the system points out the difficulty of long term antibiotic treatment: It showed that strong side effects were present with treatment; Gulf War veterans did not comply with treatment after 6 months, and the results were not statistically significant with the control group one year later. "Participants in the doxycycline group had a higher incidence of nausea and photosensitivity." Any benefits noticed at the three and six-month period were not noticed at the conclusion of the study at the one-year mark.
A year 2000 study that states that there was no correlation between mycoplasma infection and development of Gulf War Illness, and supports the hypothesis that the synergy of cofactors is an important component of Gulf era veterans' complaints:
Although the study 'Lack of serological evidence for Mycoplasma fermentans infection in army Gulf War veterans: a large scale case-control study, ' shows that antibodies to M. fermentans tend to convert to full blown infection in both those with Gulf War Illness and the control group at the same rate, the fact that there is a larger percentage of the Gulf War Illness group with the presence of the antibody to M. fermentans 48% in the GWS group vs. 5.2% in the control group suggests that there may be a link between Gulf War Illness and presence of the antibody to the mycoplasma, and that the title of the article may be misleading. 
Another study done in 1999 using immunoblot analysis stated that there was no difference between deployed, non-deployed vets and natural infection rates with M. fermentans. The study stated that the immunoblot findings were not correlated with vet's post war symptoms or death from M. fementans. The study stated that "these serologic data do not support the hypothesis that Gulf War veterans have experienced Gulf War-related morbidity from M. fermentans infection."
Conflicting data even long after the completion of the first war indicates that long-term studies on the synergy of toxic chemicals in the battlefield are sorely needed in order to provide the scientific data needed to approve the Gulf War Vets' ongoing medical treatment.
The difficulty in diagnosing and treating Gulf War Illness has led to various forms of treatment for different manifestations:
A year 2000 review of the literature in Israel examined treatment courses and subsequent findings of Gulf War Illness patients who were referred to rheumatology clinics for treatment. Symptoms included unusual tenderness during the menstrual cycle, and endocrine response in the "particularly in hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis as well as the sympathoadrenal system, leading to reduced corticotropin and epinephrine response to hypoglycemia." In this study, in terms of treatment, "the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy and behavior therapy for chronic pain in adults was emphasized."
What this means is that that's not psychological. There are specific biological actions of immunosuppression going into these Gulf War vets' bodies. Yet, this wasn't being taken into account. When they started examining the blood of these Gulf War vets, they came up with an awful high percentage of detectable mycoplasma: 59 percent. So how did they get that mycoplasma? It's not like it's just floating around in the air, and we can breath it in. It came through the vaccines.
It is known that high levels of stress can lead to illness; however, it is the contention of this paper that stress is not the only cause of these vets' illnesses. To disprove the hypothesis of post traumatic stress alone, it would be an interesting study to examine pre war symptoms of anxiety and proneness to developing infection in non-deployed vets versus the continued stress in deployed veterans.
Despite the fact that Gulf era vets may have difficulty proving mycoplasma infections are associated with their service in the Gulf, they may find some of their secondary illnesses are associated with mycoplasma infections:
For example, out of all ALS patients (both vets and non vets alike) who were tested for mycoplasma infections almost all tested positive for mycoplasma. "All Gulf War veterans with ALS were positive for M. fermentans, except one that was positive for M. genitalium. In addition, "the 22/28 civilians with detectable mycoplasmal infections had M. fermentans (13/22, 59%) as well as other Mycoplasma species in their blood." Only a small number of the control group had mycoplasmal infection; less than 3% were positive for M. Fermentans infection. "The mycoplasma most commonly detected in GWI, Mycoplasma fermentans (found in >80% of those GWI patients positive for any mycoplasma), is found intracellularly. It is unlikely that this type of infection will result in a strong antibody response, which may explain the DOD's lack of serologic evidence for these types of intracellular infections." "Results support the suggestion that infectious agents may play a role in the pathogenesis and/or progression of ALS, or alternatively ALS patients are extremely susceptible to systemic mycoplasmal infections."
Research has recently been done to test for the presence of mycoplasma in the vaccines Persian Gulf War vets receive. "Mycoplasma contamination of the licensed anthrax vaccine administered to military personnel has been suggested as a possible cause of Persian Gulf illness." Tests done in two methods did not reveal contamination by the M. fermentans mycoplasma (by gel electrophoresis and plate culture methods), but, as mentioned in the study with ALS patients, the infection with M. fermentans may be a result of an immune dysfunction that plays a role in the progression of Gulf War Illness, or it may be a secondary infection that is opportunistic with regards to the primary illness of the patient. It may also be the result of the infection by some other vaccine or the secondary reaction to some other causal agent.
Although it may be difficult to associate mycoplasma alone with Gulf War illness, Gulf war vets with symptoms of illness, may, conversely be able to support claims of infection with some factor:
In the Journal of Clinical Immunology, a 2004 study compares various immune cell markers between symptomatic and asymptomatic Gulf War Vets. "In particular, ongoing Th1-type immune activation was associated with multi-symptom illness in Gulf War Vets, with sick veterans having significantly elevated levels of IFN-gamma and IL-2 producing CD4+ cells … compared with asymptomatic veterans.So the data seem to suggest a particular kind of immune suppression in multi symptom Gulf War vets.
It showed that the vets who had Gulf War Illness had much worse immune systems. Well why wasn't this information taken to heart by the VA? It wasn't. Now here's something that has not been discussed and should be: insecticides. These were very strong insecticides that were used on the uniforms of the vets.