Research links illness to vaccines

Local Gulf War vets sick, want answers
Greenville News

Colleen Clements, 29, and her 35-year-old husband, Dan, appear as healthy as most their age as they play with their three dogs, two cats, and 6-year-old daughter, Katie.

But the disabled veteran tags on their Plymouth Sundance and Jeep Grand Cherokee tell a different story of the Anderson couple who served in the 1991 Gulf War.

So do the stacks of medical records, and the printouts of news reports and legislative discussions about Gulf War Illness that are spread across the dining room table in their blue Cape Cod home.

Colleen, a transportation operator who hauled tanks during the war, and Dan, a staff sergeant with various duties, said their health problems began during the war. They say those problems -- from rashes and diarrhea to arthritis-like symptoms and chronic sinus infections -- have progressively worsened ever since.

Neither Colleen, a former cosmetologist, nor Dan, a construction worker, are now employed. Their frustrations have turned them into Internet and e-mail junkies.

The couple's computer is their main line of communication to dozens of other veterans and the latest research into what may cause the puzzling symptoms known collectively as Gulf War Illness.

The couple blames vaccines they both received before being deployed to the Gulf. They reached that conclusion after participating in a recently published study of 144 Gulf War veterans.

The research established a correlation between Gulf War Illness symptoms and antibodies to squalene, an additive used in experimental vaccines that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for other uses.

The researchers first thought the vaccines might have contained squalene, but the Pentagon insisted -- and still does -- that squalene never has been used on Gulf War soldiers.

The report said it is possible that a vaccine without squalene might somehow stimulate production of the squalene antibody. The clinical significance of the presence of the antibodies is still not known, the scientists said.

Squalene, the fatty substance found in human and shark livers, is thought by some scientists to boost the immune system's effectiveness.

During the buildup to the conflict in early 1991, virtually everyone in the armed forces was inoculated against a battery of diseases, including bubonic plague and anthrax, because of the fear that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein might unleash biological weapons.

Researchers have long tried to figure out what causes Gulf War Illness, chronic problems suffered by about one-sixth of the 700,000 who served in the war.

In the study published in the medical journal Experimental and Molecular Pathology, Memphis immunologist Pamela Asa and colleagues at the Tulane University Medical School in New Orleans report that squalene may have played a role.

The researchers found squalene antibodies in 95 percent of the sick vets who were deployed to the Persian Gulf and in 100 percent of ill Gulf War-period vets who had received vaccinations but never were deployed to the Middle East.

The researchers found no antibodies to squalene in a control group of blood donors, lupus patients, silicone breast implant recipients and chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers.

The researchers concluded that somehow, the experimental substance has gotten into the blood and bodies of sick Gulf War veterans.

Earlier this week, veterans-affairs champion U.S. Rep. Jack Metcalf, R-Wash., and eight other House members urged Defense Secretary William Cohen to further investigate the possibility that squalene may be causing Gulf War Illness.

A day later, at a hearing of the House Government Reform Committee, U.S. Rep. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont Independent, pressed for action to address Gulf War Illnesses, and cited the recent study.

"Over the last two years, we have seen study after study show conclusively that there (are) widespread medical problems among those who served our country in the Persian Gulf," Sanders said in a statement.

He called for increased federal funding of academic and other independent studies.

The Clements, who moved from New York to Anderson about two years ago, hope the latest findings will help bring more attention to Gulf War Illness.

"The stigma we have is that we are all psycho," said Colleen, who is being treated by an Anderson neurologist.

The couple, who met before the war and then later reunited and married, spend much of their time talking and writing to people like Metcalf and the scientists who conducted the recent study.

Colleen's disability status came in October. Dan, who had planned to serve in the Army his whole life, was declared disabled in August 1998. Dan said he's had kidney stones, chronic sinusitis and has been hospitalized three times for intestinal problems.

Colleen, who said she's had two miscarriages and an operation on her bladder since the war, said she will never stop pressing for answers.

"We just have to wait," she said.