Gulf war Syndrome: The forgotten Veterans

There was a dirty little secret about the first Gulf war, and it was that many of those who served developed a debilitating neurological disease. True, some of those claiming disability were what we would now call "post traumatic stress syndrome", but the years of the Clinton administration trying to claim all the cases were psychological is a major and rarely mentioned scandal of those days.

Well, now the NYTimes notes a paper does link the disease with nerve agents.

Nearly half of the 700,000 service members who were deployed in 1990 and 1991 for the gulf war have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and more than 85 percent of those have been granted benefits, the department has reported...

Panels of medical experts have come down on both sides of the issue, with one group in 2000 questioning whether low levels of sarin could cause long-term health problems and another in 2004 concluding that toxic chemicals had caused neurological damage in many troops.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that the postwar demolition of a chemical weapons depot at Kamisiya, in southern Iraq, may have exposed 100,000 troops to nerve gas. But the military has said it was unlikely that nerve gas caused long-term illnesses in troops, a position it reiterated on Thursday.