By Thomas D. Williams
Hartford Courant, 17 November 2005
Health advocates for veterans fear that the federal government may be repeating the mistakes of the gulf war by not analyzing health complaints of returning troops.
Neither the Defense Department nor the Department of Veterans Affairs has analyzed the illness figures to determine whether they are related to wartime exposures. According to the VA, about 28 percent of the 433,398 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have sought health care, with more than 3,000 requiring hospitalization.
The U.S. has about 150,000 active duty personnel serving in both countries at any given time.
The Pentagon and VA have been collecting data on the health of returning veterans, but have not done anything with the information. In July, the Government Accountability Office criticized both for failing to match service members to an environmental map that would show who was exposed to what and how that might affect their long-term health.
Hundreds of thousands of troops who fought in Vietnam or the first gulf war became sick, either during combat or after returning home. Steve Robinson, director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said it took years for the government to begin making the connections between service members' illnesses and their wartime exposures.
As of October, figures collected by the VA show that 28 percent of 433,398 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sought some level of post-service health care and 3,087 have been hospitalized. Six percent more of the active duty military has sought that VA care than reserves or National Guard forces.
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have suffered an extensive range of both medical and psychological conditions, said James Benson, a VA spokesman. The diagnosis of 119,247 veterans from both wars shows that some have multiple symptoms or illnesses that some scientists have tied to exposures during recent military conflicts.
The most common sicknesses are joint and back and connective system disorders, 39 percent; mental problems, 30.9 percent; diseases of the digestive system, 30.1 percent; undefined conditions, 29.4 percent; and diseases of the nervous system or sense organs, 27.1 percent. Others include various poisonings, 15.5 percent; metabolism, nutritional, thyroid, parathyroid, adrenal, pancreas, and pituitary gland diseases, 15.1 percent; diseases of the circulatory system, 12.9 percent; and skin diseases, 12.8 percent.
Robinson said doctors and scientists had the most difficulty treating the undefined medical conditions from the first Gulf war.
``They [ Defense officials] should be sensitive to the mistakes they made in the 1991 Gulf war, when data collection prevented scientists from understanding the exposures and illnesses that the service members came home with,'' Robinson said.
Beyond veterans, the Pentagon has not collected information on medically verified illnesses of active-duty service members, said Perry Bishop, a Defense health spokesman. He said that task is extremely time-consuming because of the volumes of medical records in the hands of all armed services' medical personnel.
In the absence of federal action, some states, including Connecticut, have taken on health screening and testing for its National Guard personnel and reservists.
``I think the Pentagon should be tying in with all the armed services to get the health information for the best interests of our military personnel,'' said state Rep. Roger Michele, D-Bristol. He led efforts to pass recent legislation in Connecticut requiring health tests for state National Guard personnel and reservists because federal testing is inadequate.
The Pentagon has posted Internet health data from interviews and questionnaires of returning service members on the Internet, but has not verified the data either with follow-up interviews or from individual armed service branches, Bishop said. Follow-up interview results will be available within several months, he said, but verification of total illnesses will take much longer.
Bishop said medical service personnel have been monitoring the statistics for clusters of illnesses. The rate of suicides seemed high, but was found to be similar to the national average, Bishop said. The pneumonia cluster, though worrisome and causing several deaths, did not amount to an overwhelming trend, Bishop said
Questionnaires filled out by service members showed that about 4 percentand 6 percent of active and reserve service members, respectively, intended to seek mental health counseling.
They show that from 7 to 27 percent intended to seek medical referrals and that more than 80 percent of those seeking referrals were either hospitalized, or had medical treatment within six months of being questioned.
About 12 percent of active duty and 23 percent of reserve members reported possible hazardous exposures or events during deployment that may affect their health.
--------------------------------------
Citation: Thomas D. Williams. "Health Advocates Criticize Military; Want More Analysis of War Veterans' Illnesses," Hartford Courant, 17 November 2005.
Original URL: http://www.courant.com/
--------------------------------------