More Gulf Lore

Our March cover story, "Gulf Lore Syndrome," garnered a greater than usual amount of reader commentary, both positive and negative. Here is a sampling of those letters, along with author Michael Fumento's response.

From the June 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Your article has become a great myth killer for me. I too have heard Denise Nichols's bizarre tales and Brian Martin's wild claims, and just stood back in total disbelief that they were getting air time on national news. All I wanted you to know is that I very much appreciate the hard work that went into your article. Thanks for clearing up so much.

J.T. Coyne
Captain (S), MSC, USN
Executive Officer
Naval Health Research Center
San Diego, CA

MICHAEL FUMENTO'S RAMBLING, slanted "Gulf Lore Syndrome" was a disappointing discourse unworthy of REASON. Supposedly investigative articles such as this should look at all the facts, not only those the author wishes to bring out in order to shriek his opinion. More disconcerting, however, is the editor's lack of insight in allowing this piece to be printed.

Fumento complains about Gulf War vets believing only what they want to hear, yet he does precisely the same thing by not examining all the data available and offering possible answers. Instead, he chose to use open-ended, amateurish claims such as, "It is no exaggeration to say that every ailment any Persian Gulf vet has ever gotten--or that anybody has ever gotten--has been labeled a symptom of GWS." Such pedestrian assertions do nothing for this magazine's reputation. Does he expect us to believe Gulf War vets are claiming that heart attacks and AIDS, to name but two ailments, are caused by GWS?

Fumento's toeing of the mainstream political line in accepting the government's suggestion that GWS symptoms are entirely psychosomatic is discouraging. He would have us believe that the hundreds of dead camels, sheep, and goats my unit walked through a few miles below the Kuwaiti border just days before the ground war started died, in fact, of psychosomatic illnesses. And he would have us believe that the two Marines wounded in action by an Iraqi mine filled with a blister agent in lane Red One on February 24, 1991, at 0656 were, in fact, not suffering from blisters and other injuries caused by the mine, but rather from psychosomatic illnesses.

Why would REASON allow a writer to ignore the independent medical studies (by such institutions as Duke and others) that found a combination of pyridostigmine bromide (the experimental nerve agent prophylaxis we were ordered to take without being told it was experimental), DEET, and permethrin caused symptoms in lab animals very similar to some of those most commonly reported in Fumento's nonexistent malady? Why does Fumento ignore the government's long and well-documented history of denying cover-ups like their early nuclear and chemical warfare and LSD experiments on their own soldiers, and the truth behind Agent Orange (or is that all in our minds, too)? Does he really believe the government's claim that every NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) technician who detected chemical agents on the battlefield, and every piece of proven-effective chemical detection equipment that was calibrated by General Dynamics the day before the ground war kicked off, in every instance, was faulty? A 100 percent failure rate of men and equipment? Fumento's grant would better have been applied to a publication more prone to hype, political correctness, and one-sided reporting. I hope future articles by this biased and poorly supervised individual are more balanced and factual.

Bob Newman
Longmont, CO

THANK YOU for exposing the poor job the news media has performed regarding the health claims of the Gulf War veterans. Four points for your consideration:

1. The medical bacteriology text I read regarding Mycoplasma fermentans states that "M. fermentans is a normal inhabitant of the genital tract." Therefore I do not understand the statement of the "man universally acknowledged as the leading expert on MF, Dr. Shyh- Ching Lo of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology," that "�We've never found one' Persian Gulf vet with the bacterium."

2. According to Science News (November 30, 1996, page 347), the May 1996 Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health contains a study showing the nerve damage that happens to hens exposed to a combination of DEET, permethrin, and pyridostigmine bromide. (It leaves them "weak, breathless, and unable to fly.") All these chemicals were used widely by the troops in the Gulf War.

In the same article, Science News reports that, according to Department of Defense spokesman Bryan Whitman, the DOD has conducted a similar study on rats, and "the chemicals were more toxic to rats when given together than individually. It is not known whether this holds for humans. Whitman says follow-up studies are underway."

3. By the time I got to this third point I had begun to wonder whether you were interested in seeking the truth in this mess or in merely winning the debate with the media. Why? Your use of the terms experimental and investigational. What are you logically trying to tell us when you write, "The drug itself comes from a class of pharmaceuticals that has been in use since 1864"? That it is not experimental? That it is not investigational? That it is safe? Methyl alcohol comes from a class that has been around for thousands of years, but I wouldn't drink it.

My Physicians' Desk Reference gives a dosage range for pyridostigmine bromide of 60 to 1,500 milligrams per day for myasthenia gravis. As hard as you may try to minimize the amount taken by Gulf War troops with the phrase "three 30-milligram pills to be taken daily," it is still 90 milligrams, and so the troops were still taking more than what some myasthenia gravis patients take, not less. Pyridostigmine bromide does have many serious side effects. Check a PDR. Now put those side effects together with an Israeli study, reported in Science News (December 14, 1996, page 375), showing how stress caused an increase of the neurological side effects of pyridostigmine bromide in their soldiers during the Gulf War, and you can see whence the hysteria might initially have come.

The U.S. troops are stressed out because they might be gassed. They have trained for being gassed. They take pills to protect them if they are gassed. They start to get headaches, drowsiness, etc., as do 25 percent of their fellow soldiers, when they are in an area where they might be nerve gassed and are taking the pills. Even though the effects of pyridostigmine bromide alone are supposed to be of short duration, you can see where the troops might have gotten their initial dose of hysteria, can't you?

4. Don't be too hard on the media if they don't always believe the Pentagon. After all, some of them may be aware that the U.S. Army, in a germ warfare experiment, sprayed a bacterium, Serratia marcescens, over the San Francisco Bay area in the 1960s, making some people seriously ill. In that case, civilians, not soldiers, were guinea pigs. Over a year ago, I learned on Dateline NBC that the U.S. Army had also released a bacterium into the New York City subway system in 1966. I wrote two letters to Dateline NBC and one to my local NBC affiliate, KSBW, to find out the name of the bacterium, but so far none of my letters have been answered.