Area: S:SNET-L
  Msg#: 2884                    Date: 05-28Ä95  18:43
  From: Searchnet Mailing List  Read: Yes    Replied: No 
    To: All                     Mark: Del                 
  Subj: PT 1/2: PERSIAN GULF SYND


From: ur-valhalla!aol.com!Density4
Subject: Persian Gulf Syndrome: AIDS II?
Message-ID: <950528174355_15504246@aol.com>
Date: Sun, 28 May 1995 17:43:56 -0400
The Persian Gulf Syndrome

By Alan Cantwell, Jr., MD


Another AIDS-like disease is spreading among GIs who served in 
the Persian Gulf War, which ended in 1991.  The military is not 
releasing the actual number of soldiers who have contracted the 
disease, and the number of veterans who have died from the 
disease is unknown.

Reports of a mystery illness occurring in Gulf vets first 
surfaced in the spring of 1992.  About sixty Army reservists 
from the Indianapolis, Indiana area, who had been perfectly well 
while fighting in the Gulf, became ill after returning home.  
Their symptoms were puzzling.  All complained of chronic fatigue.
Many reported muscle aches, swollen and painful joints, 
headaches and memory loss, fevers and night sweat, aching teeth 
and gums, and various other symptoms.

By the summer of 1992 new cases of the mystery disease were 
popping up in other reservists, as well as enlisted personnel, 
living in various parts of the country.

The sick soldiers were convinced that something had happened to 
them in the Gulf that was causing their disease.  There was 
speculation that toxic fumes from the Kuwait oil fires, or 
diesel fluid in the shower water might be the cause.  Other 
soldiers blamed biological warfare agents released by Saddam 
Hussein.

As early as 1992 there were rumors that spouses of Persian Gulf 
vets were also coming down with symptoms.  Wives were 
experiencing an alarming number of miscarriages and birth 
defects in their babies.

Army physicians investigating the initial breakout among 
Indianan reservists concluded that the vets were suffering from 
"stress," perhaps caused by readjustment back into civilian life.
Interviewed by reporter Lyn Sherr of 20/20, one sick reservist 
complained that "when people were coming back from Vietnam, 
wringing Agent Orange out of their clothes, they were told they 
were under stress.  The Army took almost 20 years to settle that 
one, so I don't think they have a real good record of letting 
the troops know what might be going on."

By 1993, it was estimated that 8000 vets were fighting the 
illness.  People magazine (8/30/93) interviewed Indiana 
Congressman Steve Buyer, age 34, who developed respiratory 
symptoms and repeated episodes of the flu after coming home from 
the Gulf in May 1991.  Buyer also suffers from kidney problems, 
a prostrate infection, a spastic colon, and multiple allergies.  
His wife claims he was formerly as strong as a horse, but now he 
is "sick every time I turn around." Congressman Buyer urges all 
Gulf War vets to have a physical examination, so they can 
understand what is happening to their bodies.

A Los Angeles Times report (11/22/93) noted that soldiers were 
also coming down with cancer.  The Times claimed that 600 vets 
with symptoms had already been examined at the Birmingham VA 
Medical Center, and 110 additional patients were awaiting 
appointments.  When questioned, Pentagon officials estimated the 
total number of cases was "in the low thousands."

One Alabama veteran said that up to two-thirds of all reserve 
units have members who have come home sick.  Reservist William 
Kay believes his illness is due to an Iraqi Scud missile "loaded 
with chemical agents, nerve gas, and a man-made virus."  He 
thinks there is a cover-up, and he is angry that he has to fight 
another war with the federal government.

Suspicion that chemical warfare agents might be involved was 
strengthened by Defense Secretary Les Aspin, who admitted that 
low levels of these agents were detected during the war.  
However, Aspin insists that these agents are not causing the 
mystery illness.  Pentagon officials say that U.S. forces were 
hundreds of miles away from an area in northern Iraq where low 
level amounts of chemical biowarfare agents were recorded by a 
Czechoslovakian chemical detection team.  The Pentagon did admit 
that vets might have been exposed to other industrial chemical 
pollutants used in the war.

A special Capitol Hill hearing on the matter convened on 
November 9, 1993.  About fifty ill vets, some in wheelchairs, 
attended.  One vet testified his wife was now ill, and their 
daughter was born with deformed feet.  Another woman swore that 
her young son was healthy and strong when he went off to fight 
Desert Storm.  When he returned home from the Gulf, he sickened 
and died.

By 1994, military officials admitted that as many as 20,000 
(about 3%) or more of the 700,000 troops who served in the 
Persian Gulf were exhibiting symptoms of the syndrome.

A Los Angeles Times editorial (May 10, 1994) drew attention to 
experimental and unapproved vaccines and drugs that were given 
to all personnel who fought in the Gulf War.  These vaccines and 
drugs were prescribed to protect soldiers against anthrax and a 
nerve disease called myothenia gravis, as well as for protection 
against other biological warfare agents that might be used by 
enemy forces.  "In an effort to protect the health and lives of 
uniformed personnel, the U.S. military may have inadvertently 
done some of them serious injury." the Times concluded.

In a letter to the Times, VA doctor Basil Clyman admitted that 
"many Gulf War personnel were exposed inadvertently or otherwise 
to a variety of potentially toxic agents, some of which were 
administered in hopes of protecting them from still worse 
toxicities, namely those posed by biological or chemical warfare."  
He claims that individual VA facilities "through 
participation in the Persian Gulf Veterans Registry Project are 
keenly aware of these medical problems and are endeavoring to 
evaluate them and provide therapy when appropriate."  

On May 25, 1994, an official Pentagon letter sent to all Persian 
Gulf Veterans declared: "There is no information, classified and 
unclassified, that indicated chemical or biological weapons were 
used in the Persian Gulf."  However, the Pentagon did admit that 
experimental vaccines may have led to some veterans' symptoms.

Coinciding with the Pentagon letter was the release of a 160-
page congressional report based on testimony of 30 ill vets.  
The report reaffirmed that vets were exposed to chemical agents, 
mostly from Iraqi rocket attacks, on more than a dozen occasions 
in the Gulf.

A month later, a Pentagon panel concluded that "the syndrome may 
be a group of diseases caused by wartime stress, inhaling fine 
Kuwaiti sand or alcohol deprivation, among other causes."  (Los 
Angeles Times, 6/24/94).

Finally, in July 1994, Congress authorized a bill to compensate 
sick Persian Gulf War vets.  Disability payments would be paid 
for three years with automatic extensions, if, at the end of 
that period, the cause of the syndrome is still not determined.

In November 1994, news reports stressed the growing fear and 
concern that the syndrome was transmissable.  However, Pentagon 
spokesman Dennis Boxx urged caution.  "We do not have any 
indication at this point that these things are transmittable to 
children or spouses, but we have not ruled out this possibility. 
We simply cannot, because if we cannot diagnose it and describe 
what it is, we then cannot tell you that it is not transmittable."

Adding to the controversy were wives who complained about 
miscarriages and "burning semen" after sex with their husbands.  
Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, a toxicologist at the University of 
Maryland, agreed that it is possible for men exposed to toxic 
chemicals to pass the poison directly to their children through 
their semen.  And genetic alterations due to toxic substances 
can also cause alterations in sperm cells involved in conception.

Vets claim a third of Gulf War babies have abnormalities, ten 
times the normal rate.  Dr. Francis Waickman, an environmental 
pediatrician, says the syndrome can be passed on, creating an 
infant whose immune system does not function normally.

In the search for a cause of the syndrome, epidemiologists have 
been searching for a common factor that could have exposed 
everyone stationed in the Gulf.

Some sick vets were in the war zone for months, while other ill 
vets served in the Gulf for as little as nine days!  And the 
disease has affected troops who were stationed in widely 
scattered geographic areas in the Gulf.

One factor common to all the troops is that they were given 
experimental drugs and vaccines as part of the requirement to 
serve in the Gulf.

As early as December 1990, there were warnings about 
experimenting with US troops.  There was great concern about the 
decision of the FDA to allow the Pentagon to use unapproved 
experimental drugs and vaccines on soldiers without their 
consent.  Furthermore, the Pentagon refused to identify the 
types or the number of drugs and injections that they intended 
to prescribe.

An angry soldier stationed in Saudi Arabia sued the government 
in January 1991 over the issue.  Ever since the Nuremberg 
trials, which convicted many top-ranking Nazis for crimes 
against human nature, it has been considered unethical and 
unlawful to use people as guinea pigs in medical experiments 
without their informed consent.  This ethical requirement was 
waived when the soldier's lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. District 
Judge Stanley S. Harris.  The judge cited the necessity of the 
military to protect the health of its troops; the fact that the 
vaccines and drugs were untested and unapproved by the FDA was 
deemed irrelevant.

The New York Times concurred in an editorial entitled "The 
Ethics of Troop Vaccination" (1/16/91), noting that "the 
military is acting more like Florence Nightingale that (the Nazi 
doctor) Josef Mengele."

Soldiers who refused injections were given them forcibly.  One 
reservist told a CovertAction reporter she was held down against 
her will and given the first vaccination.  When the second 
inoculation was given a few weeks later, she claims someone 
sneaked up behind her and injected her before she realized what 
had happened.

Sgt. Frank Landy of Nashua, NH testified before a House Veterans 
Affairs Committee on September 21, 1992.  He blames two vaccine 
injections for his respiratory problems, chronic diarrhea, 
extreme fatigue, fevers and weight loss.  "The type of 
substandard medical care provided by the military and the lack 
of adherence to regulations is sinful.  My future and that of my 
family is undetermined due to the effect of the medications and 
the vaccinations," Landy told the committee.

Physicians who refused to cooperate with the military's forced 
vaccine program were treated harshly.  Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, 
an army reservist, protested that it was her duty under the 
Nuremberg Code of Justice not to vaccinate personnel with 
experimental vaccines without her consent.  At Huet-Vaughn's 
court-martial trial, a military judge ignored these 
considerations of international law and medical ethics, and 
sentenced the mother of three children to 30 months in prison.  
Under pressure from activist groups, the physician was released 
from prison after serving eight months.

Allegations that experimental drugs and vaccines are the cause 
of the vets' illness have been downplayed for obvious reasons.  
The Pentagon hardly wants to publicize the idea that the Persian 
Gulf Syndrome is a manmade disease caused by unethical medical 
experimentation.

The military has a long history of conducting covert medical 
experiments on its own personnel, as well as civilians.  Dozens 
of secret, planned bioattacks were perpetrated on American 
cities during the 1950s and 1960s, the most notorious being a 
six-day bioattack on San Francisco in which the military sprayed 
massive clouds of potentially harmful bacteria over the entire 
city.

The health of countless numbers of military personnel and 
civilians was damaged by years of nuclear bomb detonations at 
test sites in Nevada and elsewhere in the southwest.  In 
addition, the shocking disclosures of additional post-war 
nuclear experiments undertaken from the 1950s to the 1980s on 
unsuspecting civilians has recently come to light with the 
release of secret documents by the Department of Defense.

When mind-altering drugs were developed in the 1950s, the 
military secretly administered them to enlisted personnel, 
resulting in deaths in some cases.

Physicians play a crucial role in covert and unethical 
experimentation, as chronicled by Gordon Thomas, author of 
"Journey Into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control 
and Medical Abuse" (1989).  Thomas is horrified by the 
inescapable truth that doctors have tortured and still do.

Vaccines can be hazardous.  In World War 2, more than 50,000 
cases of hepatitis were caused when troops were injected with 
yellow fever vaccine unknowingly contaminated with human blood 
serum containing infectious hepatitis B virus.  Even the 
mandated "DPT" shot routinely given to babies has known risks.  
For example, one official DPT brochure recommends that a second 
DPT injection not be given if "serious problems of the brain 
have previously occurred within seven days after getting DPT."  
The brochure also warns parents, "Rarely, brain damage that 
lasts for the child's life has been reported after getting DPT." 
Polio vaccines can actually cause polio in rare instances.  If 
serious consequences of compulsory "routine" and "approved" 
vaccines are freely admitted, what are the health consequences 
of unapproved, untested, and experimental 
vaccines?

Experimental and non-experimental vaccine inoculation programs 
can be a surreptitious way of "introducing" harmful infectious 
agents into unsuspecting people.  Some investigators believe 
that the polio vaccine programs undertaken in the 1950s by the 
World Health Organization in Africa may have introduced the AIDS 
virus (HIV) into the black population.  The African green monkey 
is theorized as the source of the AIDS virus, and the polio 
vaccine was manufactured using kidney cells of the African green 
monkey.

Others think the World Health Organization's smallpox vaccine 
program is connected to the AIDS outbreak in Africa.  A front-
page London Times report (5/11/87) suggested that "dormant" HIV 
infection was awakened in the African population by the 
inoculation of millions of doses of smallpox vaccine by the WHO 
during the 1970s.  This shocking story linking African AIDS to 
the WHO's smallpox vaccine program was suppressed in the U.S. 
and never appeared in any major publication.

The "Introduction" of HIV Into the homosexual community 
population in America occurred the same year the hepatitis B 
vaccine experiment began in 1978 in New York City.  In the 
experiment over a thousand young promiscuous homosexual and 
bisexual men were used as guinea pigs and injected with the 
vaccine.  A few months after the homosexual experiment began in 
Manhattan, the first cases of AIDS appeared in a young gay man 
in Manhattan in 1979.  In 1980, thousands of additional gays 
were injected in subsequent hepatitis B vaccine experiments in 
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other US cities.

After the gay experiments ended in 1981, the AIDS epidemic 
became official.  The mystery disease was first called "Gay-
related immune deficiency disease" because it was diagnosed 
exclusively in young white homosexuals - the same minority group 
that volunteered for the vaccine experiments.

Is the Persian Gulf Syndrome another AIDS Holocaust in the 
making?  Like AIDS, the disease traces back to human experiments 
with untested and unapproved vaccines.  Like AIDS, the Gulf 
syndrome appears to be transmissible through sexual activity, 
and can be passed on to children.  Like AIDS, the vets' disease 
affects the immune system.  Like AIDS, there is no cure.

Unlike AIDS, health officials are silent about the number of 
people suffering and dying with the new Gulf syndrome.  Nor have 
officials commented on ways to prevent the sexual spread of the 
disease.

Is the Persian Gulf Syndrome caused by a new infectious agent 
"introduced" into the military population through forced 
experimental vaccines?

There is currently no effective treatment or cure for the Gulf 
Syndrome.  If the disease is caused by bad vaccines, it would 
mean that irresponsible scientists have once again created a man-
made disease they are powerless to eradicate.


References:

"Gulf Reservists Suffer Strange Illnesses," Los Angeles Times, 
 March 26, 1992.

"The unforeseen results of fighting in the Gulf," by Walter 
 Goodman.  New York Times, August 14, 1992.

"Gulf vets fear US 'cop-out' on baffling ills," by Bethany 
 Kandel, USA Today, September 16, 1992 

"Gulf veterans' mystery illness probed by US," by Richard A 
 Serrano, Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1993.

"Chemical arms, ailing Gulf GIs not linked, Aspin says," Richard 
 A Serrano, Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1993.

"Study of Gulf veterans' illnesses urged," by Marlene Cimons, 
 Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1994.

"Heed maladies of Gulf War vets" (Editorial), Los Angeles Times, 
 May 10, 1994.

"Pentagon ignored signs of toxic attacks, report says," by Jeff 
 Leeds, Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1994.

"Birth defects In Gulf vets' babies stir fear, debate," by 
 Richard S. Serrano, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1994.

"Guinea pigs & disposable GIs," by Tod Ensign, CovertAction, 
 Winter 1992-93.

"Medication rules altered for Gulf troops," San Francisco 
 Chronicle, December 22, 1990.

"Troops may get unlicensed drug," by Gina Kolata, New York 
 Times, January 4, 1991.

"US sued on drugs given in Gulf," by Philip J. Hilts, New York 
 Times, January 12, 1991.

"The ethics of troop vaccination" (Editorial), New York Times, 
 January 16, 1991.

"Our guinea pigs in the Gulf," by George J. Anna and Michael A. 
 Grodin, New York Tlmes, January 18, 1991.

"Troops may be forced to take test drugs," San Gabriel Valley 
 Times, February 1, 1991.

"Origins of HIV," in Queer Blood, by Alan Cantwell, Jr. MD, 
 Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, 1993, pp. 51-60.

"Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus," by Pearce Wright, 
 London Times, May 11, 1987.

"The origin of AIDS: A startling new theory attempts to answer 
 the questions 'Was it an act of God or an act of man'?" by Tom 
 Curtis, Rolling Stone, March 19, 1982.

"Gulf War Syndrome may be contagious," by Marlene Cimons, Los 
 Angeles Times, October 21, 1994.


Dr. Cantwell is a medical researcher and author.  His latest 
book, Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot, is published 
by Aries Rising Press, PO Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029.


Excerpt from Steamshovel Press #12
POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121

-!- NetMgr 0.95á
 ! Origin: snet-l@world.std.com FidoNet-> (1:330/201)