Ross Perot Helps Brownwoodians "Get Past" Their Denial !

Funding boost for veterans' ills
By CHRIS VAUGHN
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

STAR-TELEGRAM/RON T. ENNIS
Dr. Robert Haley, left, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison at the announcement of research funding for Gulf War illness Friday in Dallas.
DALLAS -- Nearly 12 years after Ross Perot Sr. initiated the first studies at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas of mysterious ailments affecting Gulf War veterans, the federal government is following his early hunch with $75 million.
Suddenly free from the year-to-year challenges of raising money for his ground-breaking research, the nation's top expert on what is known as Gulf War illness has set an ambitious timetable for answering the most vexing questions about why so many veterans got sick after a 100-hour war.
"It's been 15 years, and these guys are still suffering," said Dr. Robert Haley, the chief of epidemiology at UT Southwestern. "Everybody is frustrated."
UT Southwestern, where Haley has led most of the pioneering studies of Gulf War illness, was targeted for $15 million a year in funding from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for the next five years, making it the epicenter of nationwide efforts.
The research consolidation at UT Southwestern was written into legislation last year by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Dallas, who has long pushed for more federal research into the disease.
Officials from UT Southwestern and the VA formally signed the agreement Friday.
"This is our greatest hope -- having some neutral party able to regulate the research," said Julie Mock, president of the National Gulf War Resource Center and an Army veteran with Gulf War illness and multiple sclerosis. "This is the best-case scenario."
The two biggest projects Haley wants to tackle are developing a neuroimaging machine that allows doctors to diagnose Gulf War illness definitively and starting an experimental treatment program at the VA hospital in Dallas. He hopes to do both in the next year to two.
Currently, even with the most sophisticated brain imaging equipment in the world, doctors cannot diagnose Gulf War illness with any certainty. The illness looks similar to the early stages of Parkinson's or Huntington's diseases. And treatment options are mostly symptom-based and aren't believed to have much effect on the underlying problem.
"That's why the disease is so controversial," Haley said. "It's a disease without a diagnostic test. Nobody anymore questions that there is an illness. What they question is, 'What is the basis for it?'"
According to various estimates, from 1 in 7 to 1 in 4 veterans of the Gulf War have at least some symptoms of Gulf War illness, a broad name given to a disease that causes fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, rashes, sleep problems and memory loss. Haley has also shown that Lou Gehrig's disease is more common in Gulf War veterans.
Similar illnesses have not shown up in veterans of the most recent Iraq war.
In the mid-1990s, at Perot's urging and with his financial backing, Haley came to the conclusion that the veterans had brain injuries, most likely caused by exposure to sarin gas, pesticides and anti-nerve-gas pills. That exposure amounted to a toxic stew that affected different areas of the brain in different people, some not at all, depending on their genetics, researchers believe.
The Defense Department and the VA continued to disagree with Haley's findings, instead blaming the maladies on combat stress, and reported that Gulf War veterans had no more health problems than any other group. Perot called it the "ultimate insult" that the government fought so hard against the people it sent to war.
"I couldn't understand why we were spending so much money trying to prove it didn't exist," Hutchison said.
Four years ago, though, the Defense Department began funneling money to UT Southwestern, which was used to upgrade the brain-imaging equipment, and then-VA Secretary Anthony Principi appointed a committee to study what should be done.
That committee's report, issued in November 2004, called for the VA to target its research money at one location that was out of the normal government sphere of influence.
It was Hutchison's idea to make that UT Southwestern, said James H. Binns, chairman of the committee and a Phoenix businessman.
"Normally the government looks at how many employees are working on a problem and how much money is being spent on it, but that isn't the right approach," Binns said. "They needed to take a bold step and focus that money in one place. I'm more hopeful than I've ever been."
Hutchison and Perot said they believe that the research will yield benefits for civilians exposed to nerve agents or pesticides.
The VA will continue to spend research money at other institutions examining Gulf War illnesses, but the majority will be at UT Southwestern or under its oversight, said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, VA undersecretary for health.
"It seems hard to imagine a more important investment than studying the illnesses of combat veterans," he said.
IN THE KNOW
What is Gulf War illness?
Sometimes called Gulf War syndrome, it is the broad name for a complex set of symptoms, including disabling fatigue, memory loss, sleep problems, muscle loss and gastrointestinal problems. Thousands of veterans of the Gulf War in 1991 began to complain of mysterious problems in the months after returning home.
Researchers believe that the combination of exposure to low levels of sarin gas, frequent use of pesticides and the use of anti-nerve-gas pills handed out by the military created a toxic stew that caused brain damage in veterans with the right genetic makeup.

Chris Vaughn, (817) 390-7547 cvaughn@star-telegram.com
source: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/14405048.htm