THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 5, 1995 TAG: 9501050412
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
A panel affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences said Wednesday that the government's research on the health problems of Persian Gulf war veterans has been badly organized and has failed to determine if the so-called Gulf War Syndrome really exists.
The panel recommended that Vice President Al Gore's office should coordinate a better-organized study of complaints by thousands of veterans that they contracted illnesses in the gulf.
The report was released by a committee of the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The panel's members are experts in epidemiology, environmental medicine and the design of scientific experiments.
In a response, the Persian Gulf Veterans Coordinating Board, which has been coordinating the government's work on the syndrome, agreed that more coordination and better scientific work was necessary.
The three departments represented on the board, Veterans Affairs, Defense and Health, said they agreed with the panel ``and already have initiated or planned a number of research efforts, including large-scale epidemiological and mortality studies, along the lines that IOM recommended.''
Since 1993, government agencies led by the Veterans Affairs Department have kept track of complaints that an unusual, unexplained illness has affected thousands of the veterans. So far, the Veterans Administration has a registry of 30,000 veterans, and the Department of Defense has a registry of more than 9,000 veterans, all of whom reported unexplained symptoms.
Preliminary reports concluded that most of those examined have ordinary, diagnosable illnesses, while a small portion have symptoms that are unexplained.
Because those who came forward were self-selected, they cannot represent the collective experience of gulf war veterans, and because no control group was used - for example, a comparison group of those who were in the military at the same time but did not go to the Persian Gulf - no conclusion can be drawn about what symptoms may have been caused by service in the gulf, the report said.
KEYWORDS: GULF WAR SYNDROME ILLNESS by CNB