"Covering up a mystery
ailment"
St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
Tuesday, October 11, 1994
Section: EDITORIAL
By Linda Bonvie and Bill Bonvie
It might well deserve the label "Chemicalgate." The issue involves toxic chemicals and the possible effects that exposure to them can have on perfectly healthy people. It has all the elements of a classic cover-up - including a seemingly deliberate attempt to suppress the nature of serious physical problems now afflicting thousands of Operation Desert Storm veterans.
According to recent news accounts, scientists commissioned by the Pentagon have been unable to come up with a single underlying cause for the variety of symptoms that have collectively come to be known as "gulf war syndrome" - a malady characterized by chronic fatigue and exhaustion, respiratory and cardiac problems, memory loss, aches and pains, rashes and tumors and a general breakdown in health.
Only three or four months ago a likely "explanation" for the syndrome was being widely reported. The theory - accepted by no less than the commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Maj. Gen. Ronald Blanck - was that gulf war syndrome was nearly identical to a disorder suffered by a growing number of civilians.
The condition, MCS or multiple chemical sensitivity, is one in which a whole series of medical problems can be triggered by various common, everyday chemicals following significant exposure to a more toxic substance.
It seemed to make sense, considering the fact that the stricken veterans in most instances had undergone intense exposure not just to the noxious substances in oil fire smoke but to what a military journalist, Maj. Richard Haines, described as a "toxic cocktail" from a variety of sources while participating in the campaign.
So why have all the references to MCS suddenly disappeared from the official dialogue on gulf war syndrome? Could there actually be no such malady as multiple chemical sensitivity?
That's what the mainstream medical community has been maintaining for decades - that MCS simply doesn't exist and that doctors who claim it does and who offer "detoxing" and avoidance therapy (specialists in what is called "environmental medicine") are merely quacks out to exploit gullible patients. As recently as December 1992, the American Medical Association's Council on Scientific Affairs was claiming that it "should not be considered a recognized clinical syndrome."
So what about those reports linking gulf war syndrome to MCS? Were they just another example of how cockamamie theories can get picked up by the media that didn't bother checking out their validity with the experts?
That's what a lot of the experts would have you believe. For years, those same experts have been telling alleged MCS victims that their symptoms stem from an irrational perception that their environment is physically harmful to them and what they really need is psychiatric help.
This premise, however, tends to become somewhat murky when one listens as well to enough people who claim to be afflicted with MCS. The accounts these individuals give of how their illnesses developed all seem to have a remarkable consistency.
Most of them, in fact, sound as though they were perfectly normal, average people who had never given a thought to the possibility of chemicals jeopardizing their health before becoming acutely ill from a close encounter with some toxic substance and subsequently finding themselves unable to tolerate things like fragrances, detergents and pesticide fumes.
They sound an awful lot, in fact, like those young, robust recruits whose health and vitality suddenly and inexplicably declined after relatively brief tours of duty in the Persian Gulf. They were also told after routine physicals examinations that what was wrong with them was purely psychological.
The most striking similarity, however, can be found in the research done by Haines, who has spent two years interviewing hundreds of affected veterans. He claims that 95 percent reported suffering from a newly acquired sensitivity to low levels of common, everyday chemicals. The data he's collected have firmly convinced him that "the great majority of them clearly have MCS."
Nor is he the only one to report such findings. Accounts of MCS-like symptoms in Desert Storm veterans come from other sources as well, such as Dr. Myra Shayevitz, who works with patients at the Northampton, Mass., Veterans Administration Hospital. He is also one of a growing number of physicians who claim to have developed MCS themselves after being exposed to toxic agents in hospital environments.
In a sense, the problem is "all in their heads," according to Dr. Claudia S. Miller, who specializes in environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and is co-author of the book "Chemical Exposures: Low Levels and High Stakes." Miller contends that the mechanism of MCS may lie in the ability of chemicals to disrupt the neurochemistry of the limbic area of the human brain.
But when you have a medical and scientific establishment for whom MCS theory remains heresy, it's easy to see why such findings are given short shrift in the official evaluations - and why the references to MCS seem to have mysteriously disappeared from media accounts of the investigation of gulf war syndrome.
Many doctors will readily tell you how disastrous could be the economic consequences of recognizing MCS as a genuine disability in an era of proliferating chemical use - the potential effects on things like worker's compensation and on a whole host of industrial and financial interests. The same kinds of interests, incidentally, often play a major role in sponsoring scientific and medical research.
For them, the task of relegating a growing number of individual patients to the official case file of emotional instability has so far been a manageable one. It remains to be seen, however, whether it will continue to be so with thousands of military personnel who had the misfortune of becoming the unwitting subjects of an unintended experiment involving the effects of toxic chemicals on human beings coming - and coming home - to the Chemicalgate cover-up.
Linda and Bill Bonvie, Brigantine, N.J., are the authors of an article on the link between MCS and gulf war syndrome in a recent New Age Journal magazine.
