NUCLEAR,
BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS
June 4, 2007: A new study on American troops
suffering from, what has come to be known as "Gulf War Syndrome," indicates
that the common link among all the ill troops may be low level exposure to
Iraqi Sarin nerve gas in 1991. The Boston University School of Medicine study
asserts that as many as 100,000 U.S. troops may have been close enough to the
destroyed Sarin warheads, to have ingested tiny amounts of the nerve agent.
Not a lot is known about the long term effects of
low dosages of nerve gas. There are thousands of Iranian soldiers, who were
exposed to non-lethal doses of sarin, and other types of nerve gas, during the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Few of those Iranian victims have been examined as
closely as most U.S. veterans. Because of Irans diplomatic isolation over the
last three decades, it's been impossible to get any cooperation with them on
this issue. Iran did allow some of their chemical weapons casualties to be treated
in European hospitals, but this yielded little data on low level nerve gas
exposure.
Medical personnel who have spent a lot of time in
the Persian Gulf, or are native to the region, believe the Gulf War Syndrome is
more a reaction of non-natives to the many hostile organisms common to the
region. A Department of Defense medical study in the late 1970s came to the
same conclusion, and warned policy makers that there would be cases of
mysterious ailments of large numbers of U.S. troops were sent to the Persian
Gulf for any length of time. All this was before Iraq or Iraq were
manufacturing nerve gas, which has now become yet another potential health risk
in the region.
