Funding Continues for Illness Scientists Dismiss

Haley's research was originally underwritten by billionaire H. Ross Perot. It later gained the support of VA's Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, on which Haley sat until recently, and of a politically diverse group of legislators that includes Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) and Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio).

Haley's chief congressional patron is Texas's senior senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), who chairs the Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on military construction and veterans affairs. A year ago, she inserted an earmark in the 2007 federal budget that will channel $15 million to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where Haley is a professor and chief of epidemiology. The grant can be renewed four times, for a total of $75 million over five years.

VA cemented the arrangement Nov. 14 when it signed a contract saying UT Southwestern will "conduct and manage research projects in order to answer central questions on the nature, causes and treatments of Gulf War veterans' illnesses," said VA spokeswoman Karen Fedele.

Hutchison twice declined a request to talk to The Washington Post for this article, as did Haley.

Just how much money will go to Haley's research is unknown. Other scientists will be able to apply for funding, but the awarding of grants will bypass VA's usual mechanisms and instead go through "a process established by and headed by the dean of the medical school" at UT Southwestern, Fedele said.

Haley's backers say a lack of focus and money are the chief reasons a cause and treatment for the Gulf veterans' ailments have not been found. Hutchison spokesman Marc Short said the senator "doesn't want people to stop doing Gulf War illness research as long as there are symptoms out there that we don't understand."

The Conventional Wisdom

Outside Haley's circle, most experts think the syndrome is rooted more in medicine, psychology and culture than in toxicology.

They have concluded that it is the product of a medley of factors, including the stress of the war and the fear that Saddam Hussein might use chemical or biological weapons. For some people -- particularly reservists, in whom the symptoms are more common -- it may be a physical expression of the disruption that deployment caused in their lives. Some of the physical complaints may simply be the ordinary ups and downs of people's health, magnified by public and media attention. Gulf War syndrome may also be the military manifestation of something long seen in civilian medicine: symptoms whose cause is never found despite extensive testing and diagnostic studies.

Haley adamantly rejects that view, especially the stress argument. In three papers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 1997, he outlined six distinct neurological syndromes he identified in several dozen former members of the Navy Reserve "Seabees" construction unit who served in the Gulf. He has spent much of the past decade studying them, focusing on the three most disabling syndromes. For one series of papers, he took 165 measures of neurological function.

Among the things he and his colleagues reported was that in 12 veterans with the most severe complaints, a deep-brain structure called the left basal ganglion was smaller than usual. (The right one was normal.) He also found that some ill veterans tended to have a less active version of the enzyme paraoxonase-1, which breaks down the nerve agent sarin. Veterans with symptoms were also more likely to have abnormal eye reflexes and subtle changes in the daily variation of heart rate. What remains unclear is the significance of these results.

Poisoned on the Battlefield

Haley's most controversial claim is that many veterans suffering from the syndromes were probably exposed to a nerve agent during the war.

Nerve gas was released after the war, during the destruction of 816 pounds of sarin and cyclosarin at a storage complex in Khamisiyah, Iraq, in March 1991. The Defense Department modeled the "plume zone" from this explosion and in 1997 notified 98,910 veterans that they may have been briefly exposed downwind of Khamisiyah. That number was later increased to about 102,000.