THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 20, 1997 TAG: 9701200062
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 45 lines
Soldiers who may have encountered low doses of nerve gas when an Iraqi munitions depot was blown up after the Persian Gulf War have not reported an unusual amount of chronic illness in the ensuing five years, according to analysis of health records of soldiers who volunteered to be examined by physicians in two government programs.
In recent months, some veterans and scientists have asserted that thousands of Gulf War veterans are ill because of exposure to nerve gas during the war.
The new information - set to be discussed at a congressional hearing Tuesday - suggests that troops most likely to have encountered nerve gas in the campaign against Iraq are not showing health effects that are dramatically different, or more prevalent, than those who were not in the area of possible exposure.
The Pentagon and the CIA say the only certain release of chemical weapons occurred in March 1991, soon after the war was over, when American soldiers destroyed a complex of concrete bunkers and earthworks at a site in southern Iraq called Khamisiyah.
Military investigators are now trying to contact all 22,000 people they believe were within about 30 miles during that period to ask them about their health and what they may remember of the events.
The investigators don't yet know how many suffer from the constellation of chronic health problems that have come to be known as ``Gulf War Syndrome.'' However, military investigators and their counterparts at the VA recently examined the health records of several thousand soldiers who were in the vicinity of Khamisiyah in the first formal effort to determine if they have a pattern of health problems different from soldiers who were not in the vicinity.
The officials looked at the records of soldiers in two voluntary medical programs offered to the 697,000 Gulf War veterans. One, run by the VA, is called the Persian Gulf Health Registry. Since it opened in late 1993, about 68,000 men and women have signed up.
A similar program for active-duty military personnel is run by the Defense Department. Called the Comprehensive Clinical Evaluation Program (CCEP), it has enrolled about 38,000 people since 1994. Together, the number of enrollees total about 15.2 percent of the total number of Gulf veterans.
KEYWORDS: GULF WAR GULF WAR ILLNESS GULF WAR SICKNESS STUDY