Ian Munro | The Virginian-Pilot (TNS)
Dr. Robert Haley still has questions.
“You’re always just trying to relieve this frustration that you don’t know the answer,” Haley said.
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center researcher is among those who have studied an illness afflicting thousands of Gulf War veterans since the mid 1990s.
“First we proved that it was a disease and that it was an injury,” Haley said. “Then we proved that Sarin gas did it and then we’ve got this gene-environment interaction and the guys that are sick — it’s not their fault; they were born with a susceptibility.”
From the beginning, it was considered a mystery disease due to a lack of records of what every person was exposed to every day, according to Haley.
“This is no longer a mystery disease,” he said.
Using genetics, a study released by Haley and others last year linked the malady noted to cause respiratory complaints, sleep disturbances, forgetfulness, and muscle and joint pain, to the deadly chemical weapon Sarin. This study was another step in theory about the illness that afflicts roughly one-third of the 700,000 veterans deployed to the Persian Gulf is brain inflammation.
Before the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein “had the second largest arsenal of nerve gas in the world,” said Haley.
Earlier this month, the VA and National Institutes of Health began a five-year pair of studies to better diagnose and potentially discover a treatment for the illness.
After 10 years researching epidemiology, Haley met in 1994 with Ross Perot, the Texas business magnate who had just failed in an independent candidate bid for the presidency.
Perot was looking for advice about a troubling trend he was hearing from veterans of the Gulf War. Perot, also a veteran, went on to describe “Gulf War Syndrome” and wasn’t sure the soldiers were getting the care they needed.
Haley said he remembers Perot showing him photos of soldiers who he described as…
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