God Bless our troops, but...
a deasease or illness has a cause... many different illmessess therefore have many different causes.
"Some 30% of Gulf veterans suffer from [various combinations of ...]" This statment means there is no cause and effect, but many causes and many effects, hence no 'gulf war syndrome', just the usual array of illmesses that affect any large sample of population.
If you look at a similar sized sample of population that DID NOT go to the gulf you will find the same level or [various combinations of...]
No, you wont find that many diseases among those who did not go.
The birth defects stats are real, so is the amount of ALS among Gulf vets compared to the rest of the world.
I was diagnosed with a micoplasma infection in my lungs back in 1998 when I helped move this widow, I moved her husband's seabag from the attic to the new house, and got sick in 3 days. Something was on the bag, and it was the same something that is causing many vets to get sick, by name anyways, and I went through 3 types of antibiotics.
Only Biaxin killed it. News over the last 6 years tells of how only Biaxin was curing some of the illnesses these vets had, SOME symptoms, not all, but some.
It depends on which part of the population you sample.
What people have to remember is that we are talking about young men who are more healthy and fitter than your average civilian coming down with these illnesses.
Tony
Actually, if you look at the data, it shows that the Gulf War vets have a much higher incidence of diseases than the equivalent population.
One of the problems with the early Gulf War Syndrome studies is that they did their statistics improperly, and this error seems to be recurrent in today's thinking. The earlier studies were done by MDs, who were looking for a causative factor. A reasonable approach since the idea was to find a cure. Indeed, the original Gulf War Commission was made up of mostly MDs. What they wanted to do was to find a cause, and because of that they did the statistics wrong.
The specific problem with their data analysis was that they broke the population (i.e.the Gulf War vet population) down into very small sub-populations. The effect of that is to increase the standard relative error, which scales as 1/root n. Since n became small, the error became large, and they argued that there was no statistically significant cause of disease.
The reason they wanted to do this, is that they assumed existing causative factors and therefore existing patterns fo symptoms. Therefore, they would take only the subset of Gulf War vets with a very particular spectrum of symptoms and point out that the numbers were within the (now) large statistical uncertaintly.
They did not approach this like scientists, who would have done the statistics differently. A scientist would approach this by first considering the entire population (of Gulf War vets) and determining whether there was a statistically significant increase in serious disease with any type of sypmtom pattern. With the larger population, the statistical error is smaller, and the results show beyond statistical uncertainty that there is a clear increase in disease.
The next analysis that would be done would be to look at the increase of disease with the specific pattern of symptom shown by Gulf War vets compared to the population at large. For example, it would the the number of persons that have either: birth defects (i.e. cleft palate), respiratory problems, muscular-skelatal problems, etc. In this case you get a result that is well above the levels expected in the population, by several confidence limits.
However, the original researchers rejected these statistics. The reason was that they knew of no medical reason why these specific symptoms should appear. They could not assign a known causative factor, therefore they dismissed the data.
The obvious conclusion was that there were indeed other causitive factors that simply were not understood at the time. Subsequent research has begun to reveal these. For example, extensive studies have shown that, when taken alone, pyridostigmine causes few side effects. SImilarly with the DEET insect repellant. Similarly with exposure to burning oil-well fumes and so forth. However, what had not been considered was the toxicological effects of being exposed to these chemicals simultaneously, as we were in the Gulf War. A study in Israel, for example, showed in lab rats that pyridostigmine and DEET TAKEN TOGETHER does cause similar symptoms to Gulf War Syndrome.
Perhaps with this most recent initiative, they will get their science right.