Gulf War Syndrome, Round 38

Don't believe the latest hype.

Michael Fumento | December 24, 2001

(Page 2 of 2)

Are blue uniforms a risk factor for ALS? Doubtful. This merely shows that when you're dealing with a tiny number of cases in a huge overall population, just a few can cause a huge statistical swing. Resample these groups in a couple of years and the apparent increase may well disappear.

That has been the experience of the Air Force researchers who for decades have followed a group of men who sprayed Agent Orange and as a result had extremely high exposures. One year there would be an excess of one disease but three years later it would disappear, only to be replaced by a slight excess of another. The latest slight excess is diabetes, but that too could well disappear by the next examination time.

What's more, it turns out that whether the Gulf vets actually had any excess of ALS depends on the group to whom you compare them.

An exact comparison to the civilian population is impossible because, as noted, the researchers didn't release their data. But the incidence of ALS in the U.S. male population is about two per million per year. So for 1.8 million such persons over ten years we'd expect 36 cases. Consider that the vast majority of vets deployed were men, that men are 50% more likely to get ALS than women, and that there are almost no ALS cases in persons under age 20 and -- voila! -- the rate of ALS among Gulf vets appears to be about the same as among civilians.

It's not that the Gulf vets are sicker than we would expect, but that the non-Gulf vets are healthier.

Arguably vets are the better control group, but this does call into question compensating people who have disease rates no higher than civilians. And again it shows that tiny numbers lead to unreliable outcomes -- or outcomes that can be thrown off by the smallest of errors.

The study also committed a whopper. The researchers told the New York Times that they identified ALS cases among Gulf vets in part by appealing to GWS activist groups. There are no activist groups for the non-deployed vets they used as controls.

This would be like conducting a public opinion poll in which the men surveyed were drawn from liberal groups and the women surveyed were contacted by random dialing, then announcing that the results show men are more likely to be liberals.

In short, every headline about the study should have been a variation of "Yet Again, No Link Found between Gulf Service and Illness." But even if the study had shown a link -- indeed, even if it had shown a cause-and-effect association -- it could not establish the existence of this beast known as Gulf War Syndrome.

The findings applied to a mere 40 vets and one illness. Yet tens of thousands of Gulf vets (150,000 according to the Raleigh paper, using a fabricated number) have complained of over 120 different illnesses that they claim are service-connected. Does establishing that a man robbed one bank prove that he robbed a thousand?

No matter; the activists have spoken and the media have given them a bullhorn. As U.S. News & World Report put it, "The findings were heralded by some veterans groups as a major victory in their 10-year fight to have their symptoms connected to their deployment in the gulf."

A Boston Globe editorial touting the study said, "At a time when US soldiers are again in harm's way, the military must be alert to all possible hazards." Right. That includes the hazard of telling soldiers going into harm's way that while they may survive the war unscathed, they could actually become exposed to some undetectable sort of magical pixie dust that will make them sicken and die years or even decades later. There's never a good time for nonsense like this, but during a war is the worst time of all.