Friday, May 25, 2007
Sarin is the cause
The latest report, funded by the DoD and the VA and using Pentagon data about troop movement in Bush War I, lays the cause of Gulf War Syndrome at the feet of the Sarin plume from the destruction of Saddam's Chemical weapons depot at Khamisiyah.
In 1999, working on behalf of the Rand Corp., Beatrice Golomb, professor of internal medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, reviewed every study she could find on the issue. She said it was the first time anyone had pulled all that research together.The VA says it will study this further.
Golomb said she found a link between symptoms of Gulf War veterans and their exposure to sarin, pyridostigmine bromide (PB) and bug repellent, all of which overstimulate muscles by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase, a chemical that signals muscles to stop moving. The tongue, being a big muscle, eventually cuts off a person’s ability to breathe if it is overstimulated.
In the case of the bug repellent, the ill effects are aimed at the bug, not the person wearing the repellent.
In large enough amounts, PB is harmful, but in small doses it acts to prevent nerve agents from overstimulating muscles, and the effects of PB itself are temporary and reversible.
Exposure to sarin alone would be problematic enough. But for Gulf War veterans, exposure to sarin as well as PB and/or bug repellent may have been what ushered in Gulf War syndrome.
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