Report On Gulf War Illness Criticized Gao Conclusions Unwarranted, Say Pentagon, Blue-Ribbon Panel

A presidential panel and the Pentagon on Monday strongly disputed a new report by the General Accounting Office asserting there is “substantial evidence” that low-level exposure to poison gas weapons could cause delayed or long-term ailments of Gulf War veterans.

The assertion is made in a GAO draft report, which is to be issued later this month and was the subject of weekend news reports.

The Pentagon and the panel appointed by President Clinton to look into Gulf War veterans’ illnesses said the GAO had analyzed the same scientific research and data that they had reviewed, but had reached a different and unwarranted conclusion.

In a 10-page, point-by-point rebuttal, the chairwoman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illness, Joyce C. Lashof, said the GAO “fails to present references that document its ‘substantial evidence.”’

Lashof also said overall that the GAO report “misrepresents” her panel’s work, “is lacking in substantiation and analytic rigor,” and makes sweeping, scientific-sounding statements that are “specious and misleading.”

“I regret the blunt directness,” Lashof, the former dean of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, begins the letter, “but the quality of this manuscript is so flawed that no other approach was possible.”

The presidential panel concluded that stress, rather than Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, was the likely cause of veterans’ health problems. The GAO said the panel had overemphasized stress as a factor.

The 89-page GAO draft report also raised the possibility that soldiers may have been exposed to aflatoxin, a long-term carcinogen the Iraqis developed in their biological weapons program.

“Questions remain unanswered about … veterans’ possible exposure to the biological agent aflatoxin, the health effects of which of which may not be known for months, or even years, after exposure,” it said.

The presidential panel and the Pentagon have said there is no evidence that troops were exposed to aflatoxin, and the GAO provided no fresh data to back up its claim.

The presidential panel is composed of scientists and others from the private sector and academia, many of whom have spent their careers questioning government decisions and policies. The panel includes, for example, Arthur Caplan, a preeminent medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elaine Larson, dean of the Georgetown University school of nursing.

But in the finger-pointing atmosphere that followed the Pentagon’s announcement last June that soldiers likely were exposed to chemical weapons at an ammunition depot in southern Iraq, panel members have been accused by veterans advocates and others as being part of a governmentwide cover-up of the facts.

Monday, the Pentagon took the unusual step of talking about the GAO report before it had even been released. Repeating past admissions that they had failed to do an adequate job until recently of investigating incidences of possible chemical exposure, Pentagon officials nonetheless took exception to GAO’s conclusions that the Defense Department had not owed up to its mistakes.

“There’s frankly nothing little new in it, and many of the criticisms you’ve heard me make from the podium,” said Bernard Rostker, who heads the Pentagon’s review of the Gulf War illness issue.