THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 14, 1994 TAG: 9411140222
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RICHARD A. SERRANO, LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. LENGTH: Long : 133 lines
Ten babies have died here already.
The children of Persian Gulf war veterans, they died of heart defects and liver cancer. One was born with no spleen. Three were born dead.
Their short, tragic lives - chronicled neatly by their mothers in family photo albums - are raising new fears that the mysterious Gulf War Disease syndrome, an unexplainable, untreatable affliction that reportedly has touched thousands of those who fought in the desert, is now being passed on to the next generation.
Here at Fort Bragg, home to the Army's 82nd Airborne Corps, veterans' wives learned almost by accident that they were not the only ones mysteriously losing children. Some by chance struck up casual conversations with other grieving mothers at the beauty shop; others traded stories at the local grocery.
The Fort Bragg experience is being repeated all over the United States. With some groups believing that as many as 65 percent of the children born to Gulf War soldiers are afflicted in some form or another, veterans and their spouses are confused and angry - and are increasingly refusing to have more children.
Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, a molecular toxicologist at the University of Maryland, told a congressional hearing in August that scientists now know that men exposed to toxic chemicals can pass the poison directly to their children through semen. What is frightening, she said, is that the chemicals can cause genetic mutations to the sperm that helps conceive the child.
Exactly why this occurs, she added, is the ``question we know the least about.''
Dr. Francis J. Waickman, an Akron, Ohio, environmental pediatrician, compared birth-defect statistics between gulf war babies and other children. He found a 30 percent rate of abnormalities among the children of gulf veterans - ``probably tenfold of what is in the normal population,'' he said.
But as experts delve further into the issue, he said, more questions pop up. ``Can it be passed on? The answer is yes, insofar as we have hard evidence that chemicals can absolutely decrease numbers of sperm.
``It can create an infant whose immune system does not function normally, and as a consequence this can be a cause for the increased incidence of infections in these children.
``But does this alter genes? And can this occur when you have severe chemical exposure?''
He answered his questions this way: ``To my knowledge, this is the first time we've ever had such a large group exposed to a possible large degree of chemicals, so we better learn from this whole series of events.''
Betty Mekdeci, founder and director of the Association of Birth Defect Children in Orlando, Fla., is also studying the illnesses and deaths. Her group is circulating 10,000 questionnaires to gulf war families, all information that will be dissected to look for trends and patterns. What she hopes to determine is whether the ailments and fatalities are linked to the war, or simply mirror society.
Defense Department officials say that while they sympathize deeply, they have yet to pinpoint a cause. They maintain that unless more research shows otherwise, U.S. soldiers were not exposed to life-threatening chemicals or other toxic agents from either the U.S. military or the regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
Air Force Lt. Col. Doug Hart, a Pentagon spokesman on health and personnel matters, says some studies suggest that infant deaths and birth abnormalities are in line with expected percentages in the general population.
But don't tell that to the mothers of Waynesboro, Miss., site of a National Guard quartermaster corps. There, 13 of the 15 children born to returning gulf war veterans suffer from serious birth defects.
Infant-mortality rates have suddenly increased among gulf war veterans in four counties in Kentucky and Tennessee, home base of the Army's 101st Airborne Division; in three counties in Georgia that support the Army's 197th Infantry Division; and at Fort Hood in Texas.
Here in Fayetteville, Melanie Ayers lost her 5-month-old son, Michael. Except for some unusual sweating bouts, he had seemed a healthy child. Then during a restless sleep one night last summer, he stopped breathing. And while Ayers frantically drove him to the hospital, he died.
``It's very frustrating the way people are just patronizing to us,'' she said. ``They pretend they understand our anguish. But we're getting more upset with government officials coming out and saying how confusing this all is but doing nothing to solve it.''
Hart, the Air Force spokesman, said the Pentagon is continuing to gather and examine statistics on health matters from gulf war veterans and is comparing them with soldiers who did not go to the gulf, as well as accumulating other data on the long list of ailments that have touched the soldiers and their families.
He noted that a study by the Mississippi State Department of Health, which analyzed the incidents of birth defects in Waynesboro, came up with initial findings that indicated a normal rate of birth defects for the group there.
Yet the phenomenon persists.
About a year after the war ended in early 1991, veterans began complaining of strange diseases. Rashes, nausea, headaches and even more severe ailments such as blood clots and cancers. Pentagon, veterans affairs and private medical experts remain at a loss to explain the problems, let alone determine if they are in any way related to service in the gulf war.
In hearings before Congress, the sick veterans charged that they were carelessly exposed to dangerous toxins and that the government knew of the health risks.
Meanwhile, a special gulf war registry continues to document the individual cases of veterans. Of the 697,000 soldiers sent to the region, about 29,000 have signed onto the VA's registry. Similar to the roster of Vietnam Agent Orange sufferers drawn up a generation earlier, the registry will be used to collate information and, officials hope, sort out a cause.
But it is the new indications that the disease is spreading to the children that alarms many racing to find a cure.
Experts in the private sector theorize that U.S. troops may have been harmed by any of a wide range of chemical or biological agents, uranium, sandfly fever or oil fires, as well as anti-nerve gas medications.
When they returned home and began reporting their symptoms, some of their wives also began coming down with similar rashes, fatigue and other ailments. Strangest of all, many wives complained - and still complain - of burning urinary tract and vaginal infections after having sex with their husbands. They also said their husbands produce ``burning semen'' that burns the skin when it is touched.
A recent report by the government's General Accounting Office identified three substances - pesticides, oil fires and decontaminating agents - that were present in the war environment and may have caused ``reproductive dysfunction'' in the soldiers. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
A GENETIC LEGACY OF WAR?
Scientists now know that men exposed to toxic chemicals can pass
the poison directly to their children. The chemicals can cause
genetic mutations to the sperm that helps conceive the child.
One doctor found a 30 percent rate of abnormalities among the
children of Persian Gulf War veterans - ``probably tenfold of what
is in the normal population,'' he said.
Some groups believe that as many as 65 percent of the children
born to gulf war soldiers are afflicted in some form or another.
KEYWORDS: GULF WAR VETERAN BIRTH DEFECT by CNB