Gulf War Illnesses Debate Rages On for 18 Years: No End in Sight for the Sick
by: Thomas D. Williams, truthout.org
Thursday 19 March 2009
Barack Obama is now the fourth president facing the scientific and bureaucratic conundrum around the US-created ongoing wartime hazards producing disastrous health complications for soldiers and civilians.
Eighteen years after the six-week first Gulf War, maladies still haunt thousands of US and allied service members as well as estimated hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Afghan civilians. A myriad of scientists and government officials insist it is bewildering to pinpoint whether countless chemical and radiological hazards either killed or sickened hundreds of thousands of US service members, allied soldiers and Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Afghan civilians. Federal health officials have not only denied monetary and health assistance to thousands of veterans, whose illnesses they say cannot be linked to US created wartime hazards, but they have mostly failed to assist the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Afghan civilian health system.
"Our war (the first Gulf War) was the most toxic as far as exposures ever in history," said Denise Nichols, a retired US Air Force registered nurse and veterans' advocate, who herself suffers from wartime illness. "How can parents or the American citizens trust their government or encourage their young to enlist when this history of neglect and denial of gulf war illness is allowed to fester … [the US Department of Veterans Affairs] has betrayed us. [The Department of Defense] has betrayed us. The government for 17 years betrayed the trust we as soldiers, airmen, marines, or sailors had, and our trust must be regained by [incoming President Barack Obama]."
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From The Department Of it's about f*$%king time
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Have DU will travel a special publication by the Lone Star Iconoclast in crawford Texas. Published on March 1, 2006, this is an important report on DU from several perspectives. It is a fairly large PDF file and might take a while to download, but worth the weight, err wate? ...zzzZZZ
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