gulf war syndrome is thought to be due to contact with low levels of WMD...after 8 years of Clinton's VA administration claiming it was all psychological...
and guess who helped fund the US study that proved WMD were involved? Ross Perot...(the Brits found the same thing in a separate study)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4019437.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4008795.stm
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996609
"...Epidemiologist Robert Haley of the University of Texas in Dallas blames the US government’s past denial of a syndrome on a “10-year misadventure”. Expecting many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) the US authorities tested large groups of veterans, using questionnaires designed to screen for PTSD. Some 20% tested positive. Roughly the same percentage were reporting ill health, so the authorities blamed the mysterious illnesses on stress, Haley says.
However, the tests they used were designed to pick out possible cases for psychiatric evaluation, not to give a definitive diagnosis, and normally give a false positive rate around 20%. Follow-up investigations in the US and UK later showed only some 3% really had PTSD, not nearly enough to account for the sick veterans. Yet the conviction that Gulf illness is somehow caused by stress has persisted.
“What we should have done was what we do for every new disease: establish a case definition,” Haley says. This means finding out what unusual symptoms people are reporting, then looking for those symptoms in larger groups to see if they are widespread, associated with particular histories, or if they occur in characteristic clusters.
"With funding from billionaire businessman and one-time independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, Haley did just that. “When we talked to the veterans, certain symptoms really stood out,” he says. He then constructed a questionnaire to find out if two separate groups of veterans had similar symptoms.
"Asking specific questions was crucial. “If you ask people, do you have aches and pains, people will say yes. But if you ask, do you have severe joint pains that keep you awake and last all day and for months, healthy people don’t. Gulf veterans do..."