[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 124 (Wednesday, September 17, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H7484-H7485]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        PERSIAN GULF WAR SYNDROME STILL A MYSTERY AFTER 6 YEARS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, I want to address one of the most important 
issues facing American veterans and one of the great medical dilemmas 
facing our entire country, and that is that over 70,000 veterans of the 
Persian Gulf war, including hundreds in my own State of Vermont, 
continue to suffer from gulf war illness, and 6 years, 6 years after 
the completion of that war, there is still no understanding of the 
cause of that illness and no effective treatment for it.
  Mr. Speaker, as you know, the gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Shays], 
who is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Resources, has held 10 
hearings on gulf war illness since March, 1996. As a member of that 
committee, I cannot begin to express the frustration that many of us 
feel regarding the ineptitude of the Department of Defense and the 
Veterans Administration in responding adequately and effectively to the 
needs of those veterans who continue to hurt.
  Pure and simple, the bottom line is that 6 years after the end of the 
Persian Gulf war, the Department of Defense and the Veterans 
Administration still have not developed an understanding of the cause 
of gulf war illness or an effective treatment protocol. In fact, their 
record has been so inadequate that several weeks ago the Presidential 
Advisory Committee on Persian Gulf War Veterans Illnesses indicated 
that it will be recommending to the President that an independent 
agency outside of the Pentagon take responsibility for investigating 
the health effects of low level chemical and biological weapons 
exposure.
  According to Arthur L. Kaplan, a bio-ethics professor at the 
University of

[[Page H7485]]

Pennsylvania, and a member of that panel, ``The Pentagon is not 
credible to continue inquiries that veterans and the public do not find 
persuasive.''
  The New York Times writes in discussing that issue:

       A special White House panel said today that the Pentagon 
     had lost so much credibility in its investigation of the 
     release of Iraqi chemical weapons in the 1991 Persian Gulf 
     War that oversight of the investigation must be taken away 
     from the Defense Department permanently.

  Mr. Speaker, I am happy to inform my colleagues that there is 
language in the committee report of Labor-HHS, which passed the House 
today, language which I introduced, which funds an independent, 
scientific research program, into how chemical exposures in the Persian 
Gulf relate to the illnesses suffered by 70,000 of our veterans.

                              {time}  1645

  This research program is to be implemented through the Secretary of 
Health, with the National Institute of Environmental Health Science as 
the lead agency. The committee has agreed to appropriate $1.1 million 
for next year and $7 million over a 5-year period.
  What is important here, and it is very important, is that for the 
first time a governmental agency outside of the Department of Defense 
and the Department of Veterans Affairs is going to take a hard look at 
the role that chemicals may have played in causing gulf war illness. 
This is a major breakthrough, and we have to continue in that effort.
  This report language is strongly supported by the American Legion, 
the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the National Gulf War Resource 
Center. Veterans and Americans all over this country are, to say the 
least, less than impressed about the role that DOD and VA have played 
in this entire process from the very end of the war until today.
  Mr. Speaker, the military theater in the Persian Gulf was a chemical 
cesspool. Our troops were exposed to chemical warfare agents, leaded 
petroleum, widespread use of pesticides, depleted uranium, and burning 
oil wells. In addition, they were given a myriad of pharmaceuticals as 
vaccines.
  Further, and perhaps most importantly, as a result of a waiver from 
the FDA, hundreds of thousands of our troops were given pyridostigmine 
bromide, which was being used as an antinerve gas agent, had never been 
used in this capacity before. Under an agreement between the DOD and 
the FDA in regards to this waiver, the DOD was required to collect data 
on any use of pyridostigmine bromide. However, they failed to do that.
  Mr. Speaker, we are beginning to make some progress by going outside 
of the DOD and the VA. It is a breakthrough. We have to continue in 
that direction in order to address this enormously serious problem.
  For 5 years, the Pentagon denied that our soldiers had been exposed 
to any chemical warfare agents. Finally, after being forced to admit 
that there were exposures, they suggested that the exposures were 
``limited''. The DOD's first estimates were 400 troops exposed, then 
20,000 troops. In July of this year, the DOD and DIA gave us their best 
estimate--that as many as 98,910 American troops could have been 
exposed to chemical warfare agents due to destruction of ``the Pit'' in 
Khamisyah, an Iraqi munitions facility. Mr. Chairman, I would not be 
surprised if this estimate is revised upward in the not too distant 
future, as more information is gathered regarding other incidents of 
chemical warfare exposure.
  Mr. Speaker, an increasing number of scientists now believe that the 
synergistic effect of chemical exposures, plus the investigational 
vaccine pyridostigmine bromide, may well be a major cause of the health 
problems affecting our soldiers:
  Dr. Robert W. Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical 
Center concludes that the gulf war syndromes are caused by low level 
chemical nerve agents combined with other chemicals, including 
pyridostigmine bromide. Doctors Mohammed Abou-Donia and Tom Kurt, of 
Duke University Medical Center, in studies using hens, found that a 
combination of two pesticides used in the gulf war, in combination with 
pyridostigmine bromide causes neurological deficits in test animals, 
similar to those reported by some gulf war veterans Doctors Garth and 
Nancy Nicolson have completed research which concludes that gulf war 
veterans' illnesses may be due to combinations of chemical exposures in 
the Persian Gulf. Dr. Claudia Miller reports that there are 
similarities between the gulf war veterans' symptoms and those of some 
civilians exposed to organophosphate pesticides, carbamate pesticides, 
or low levels of volatile organic chemical mixtures. Dr. William Rea 
concludes that neurotoxic environmental exposures and other personal 
exposures prior to and during deployment in the gulf may have resulted 
in chronically deregulated immune and nonimmune detoxification systems, 
resulting in multi-symptom illness. In addition, a number of these 
scientists and physicians have devised treatment protocols for gulf war 
illnesses and some are reporting success in their treatments. These are 
the types of research programs and treatment protocols which our 
Government should be aggressively pursuing for the sake of our 
veterans, and what I hope will be accelerated as a result of this 
language.
  The National Institute of Environmental Health is eager and ready to 
begin research and to provide its results to Congress in an expedient 
manner. This research program will address three areas of which are 
necessary to better understand the nature of the problem. These are: 
First, capitalizing on the existing body of knowledge of a similar 
disorder called multiple chemical sensitivity, second, defining 
individual genetic differences in the ability to metabolize 
environmental agents commonly encountered during Desert Storm, and 
third, developing a better understanding of how multiple exposures 
interact to exert their toxicity on an organism. Moreover, the research 
program is to include an investigation of treatment protocols which are 
being developed in the public and private sectors for illnesses 
resulting from chemical and other environmental exposures.

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