Changes May Be Needed in Study of Gulf War Syndrome, Scientist Says
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON -- The scientist who led a 1994 Pentagon study that discounted links between chemical weapons and the illnesses reported by veterans of the Persian Gulf war said Monday that some of the findings might have to be revised in light of newly disclosed evidence from the Pentagon -- evidence the Defense Department did not share with him at the time of his investigation.
The scientist, Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and the former president of Rockefeller University, said the Pentagon had never told him about an incident shortly after the war in which American combat engineers blew up an Iraqi ammunition depot that contained chemical weapons, potentially exposing thousands of troops to nerve gas.
He said in an interview that as a result of the newly disclosed evidence, there should be an intensified effort to determine whether low doses of nerve gas could cause long-term illnesses.
The comments by Lederberg throw into question many of the conclusions of a study that the Pentagon had cited for more than two years in insisting there was no evidence that Americans had been exposed to Iraqi nerve gas or other chemical weapons during the war, let alone that the troops had been made ill by the poisons.
In addition, Lederberg said the panel had not been informed that Czech soldiers who had detected chemical weapons during the war had been so concerned about the possibility of chemical exposure that they had immediately pulled on gas masks and other protective equipment, even as American soldiers remained unprotected.
"If I had it all to do over again," he said in an interview, "I would have spent more time and effort digging out the details." Asked why the Pentagon had not shared some of the information with his panel, Lederberg replied, "I was not operating on the presumption of malice, but maybe after this experience, I want to be a little more cautious about that."
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, denied that any information had been withheld from Lederberg's panel. "There was never any attempt to withhold any information," he said. "They had full access to everything."
But Lederberg said, "We didn't get all the information, and I don't know where it was."
He said he did not necessarily believe that anyone within the Defense Department had attempted to mislead his panel, the Defense Science Task Force on Persian Gulf War Health Effects. "Un-lead is probably a better word than mislead," he said.
"I know what a complex organization we're dealing with, how many different turfs there are," Lederberg said. "The intelligence units in particular are very jealous of anything they hold. They particularly defy access to their raw data. It's not surprising that there are goof-ups of this sort from time to time."
He said he was also concerned about the implications of new research by Israeli scientists that showed that an drug given to allied troops during the war to protect them from the effects of nerve gas might enter the brain under conditions of stress and cause symptoms like those seen among gulf war veterans.
NEW LOOK AT 1970s STUDY
Lederberg's comments came as three former Army researchers said that research they conducted for the Pentagon in the 1970s suggested a connection between low levels of nerve gas -- doses so small they might not result in immediate physical symptoms -- and the sorts of health problems reported by gulf war veterans.
The researchers -- Dr. Frank H. Duffy, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School; Dr. James L. Burchfiel, professor of neurology at the University of Rochester; and Dr. Peter H. Bartels, professor of pathology at the University of Arizona -- said in interviews that the Pentagon seemed intent on ignoring or dismissing their evidence.
Their research, which studied the effects of low doses of sarin on both humans and primates, showed that the exposure resulted in long-term, perhaps permanent, changes in brain waves, which could possibly be connected with chronic fatigue, memory loss, sleep disturbances and a decrease in sexual drive. Those symptoms are among those commonly reported by gulf war veterans.
In a report on the issue that was widely distributed earlier this year to gulf war veterans, the Pentagon discounted the importance of the research done by Duffy and his colleagues, while embracing other studies that suggested there was no link between low-level exposures to nerve gas and the illnesses reported by gulf war veterans.
"There is no credible evidence for chronic illnesses caused by exposure to organophosphate nerve agents at concentrations too low to produce signs or symptoms" of poisoning at the time of the exposure, the report said. It added, "Such a process cannot reasonably be advanced as having a role in gulf war illnesses." Sarin is among the family of chemical compounds known as organophosphates.
SOME CRITICISM FOR THE PENTAGON
Duffy and Bartels said they believed that the Pentagon's statements on the issue of chemical exposures might reflect a fear within the Defense Department that it could be held responsible for the medical costs of thousands of gulf war veterans who have since reported serious health problems.
"I guess people can't afford to take a position when they're talking about billions of dollars," said Duffy, whose research was conducted in the 1970s at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, where the Army kept stores of nerve gas and other chemical weapons.
Duffy said of the Pentagon's report: "The conclusions that they come to are not supported by the details of the scientific fact."
"I think it's disturbing because this has precluded a very reasonable possibility," he said, "and that's unfair to the people" who may now be ill.
Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman, said the report had been "an honest attempt to take a review of the literature that was out there," and he noted that the Pentagon had committed $15 million this year to new research on the health effects of low-level chemical exposures.
"Nobody is trying to duck any responsibility here," he said. "Clearly we believe more needs to be done."
Researchers have struggled to explain the illnesses reported by thousands of gulf war veterans. A White House panel recently concluded that many of the ailments might be related to the physical aftereffects of wartime stress, while other researchers have suggested that Iraqi chemical or biological weapons could explain the veterans' health problems.
Lederberg said that while "the literature on this is absolutely divided and still quite controversial," the theories offered by Duffy and his colleagues "need to be taken very seriously."
He said his panel might have been "too firm" in 1994 in discounting a link between the illnesses of gulf war veterans and exposure to nerve gas at levels too low to produce immediate physical symptoms. "Maybe we shouldn't have been so categorical that there wouldn't be anything there without acute findings."
But he said it was surprising that so few soldiers had reported during the war anything like the sorts of acute symptoms usually linked to sarin poisoning.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST FIRMLY DENIED
Lederberg agreed to a phone interview in order to rebut recent reports suggesting that he had faced a conflict of interest while pursuing the investigation in 1993 and 1994 on gulf war illnesses.
He said he saw no conflict between the investigation and his unpaid membership at the time on the board of directors of the American Type Culture Collection, a respected nonprofit group that acts as a clearinghouse for biological specimens that are distributed to scientists around the world. Export records show that the government permitted the group to ship anthrax and other biological agents to Iraq, for what the Iraqis described as peaceful research, between 1985 and 1989.
Lederberg, who joined the board in 1990, said that he had not been aware of the shipments to Iraq when he began the gulf war investigation in 1993, nor did he see a conflict when the Senate Banking Committee made evidence about the Iraqi shipments public in 1994. He said he had reported his ties to the group in a disclosure statement filed with the Pentagon in January 1994.
"We were supposed to investigate the health of the veterans," he said. If the American Type Culture Collection "had been the focus of our investigation, then there would have been a very serious question" about a conflict of interest. "I saw the ATCC part of that as a minor incident."
Lederberg described his duties on the board as "purely ceremonial" and said he had never attended a board meeting. "I received zero compensation," he said. "There's no financial incentive whatsoever."
He said the allegations of a conflict of interest were ironic given his years of effort to curb the proliferation of biological agents.
"I can't tell you the irony there," he said. "There is no issue on which I've worked harder." He said that if he had been on the board of the company at the time of the Iraq shipments, he would have "tried to find a mechanism by which this could have been denied them."
Because of the prominence of Lederberg and the other scientists on the panel, which included researchers from Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins universities, their June 1994 report was considered a definitive study of gulf war illnesses.
The report concluded, "There is no evidence that either high or low levels of exposures of U.S. troops to chemical agents occurred, and there is no indication from research that there would be chronic sequelae from low-level exposure even if it had occurred."
On biological weapons, the report said, "The diseases associated with B.W. agents -- e.g., anthrax, botulinum, etc. -- are notable for acute effects and would have been rapidly evident and rapidly diagnosed had they occurred among U.S. or coalition troops during the war."
The issue raised by Duffy and his colleagues is a vital one to ailing gulf war veterans: Is it possible to have long-term health problems as a result of exposures to nerve gas at doses so low that there were no obvious physical symptoms at the time of the exposures?
Pentagon officials have said that their review of the scarce available research on the issue suggests that there should not be any long-term health consequences.
Operating on that theory, American military commanders in the gulf war disregarded chemical-detection alarms that sounded repeatedly across the battlefield, they have said.
Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war, said in an interview last week that military commanders had disregarded the alarms because they "didn't see anybody becoming ill, and chemical weapons usually make you ill rather immediately."
Pentagon officials have cited that argument repeatedly since the announcement earlier this year that thousands of American soldiers may have been exposed to the nerve gas sarin when Army engineers blew up the Kamisiyah ammunition depot in southern Iraq in March 1991.
Army logs show that few, if any, soldiers at the scene of the explosions reported physical symptoms at the time of the explosion; many have since reported serious ailments, however, including chronic digestive problems, joint pain and fatigue.
But the three former Army researchers, who published their study in a medical journal in 1979, said the Pentagon's conclusions reflected a serious and ill-informed bias.
Bartels said the Pentagon report was "unbalanced" and "slanted" in its attempts to dismiss the significance of the research at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. "Dishonest is a very strong term," he continued. "It may be simple ignorance."
Burchfiel declined to speculate on the reasons for the Pentagon's conclusions, which he called "completely wrong." But he added, "It's very hard to exclude bias."
All three researchers made clear that they had no special evidence to suggest that gulf war veterans had been exposed to Iraqi nerve gas or that nerve gas might be in any way responsible for the health problems reported by thousands of them.
"I'm not trying to take anybody's side here," Duffy said. "Whether or not they were exposed is something I can't comment on."
"But if the issue is, 'Is it possible with single undetected exposure to have consequences?' the answer would have to be, 'Yes, it's possible,' " he said. "It's reasonable and probably likely that there would be an effect."
Duffy said he suspected that even if troops in the gulf war had suffered symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, like pupil dilation or a tightening of the throat, at the time of the exposures, they might never have noticed them.
"Let's suppose you're over in the gulf and you're wearing a heavy uniform and it's over 100 degrees and you're feeling lousy and you're worried that a Scud is about to come over, and you get a whiff of organophosphates," he said. "You might not notice. It would just fit right in with how bad you're feeling."
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
Louis Proyect
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