Haley recently re-examined another group of influential studies, the ones that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine last year that purportedly found no higher incidence of hospitalization or death within three years after the war among servicemen who went to the gulf and those who didn't.
Haley uncovered two flaws in the hospitalization study, according to a recent lecture he gave at Southwestern Medical School. First, the authors looked only at military hospitalizations. This would skew their results, Haley explains, because the sickest veterans were discharged after the war and could have been seen in civilian hospitals. Second, the study assumed the two categories of veterans were the same. "Who goes to war? The healthiest soldiers. Anyone who had chronic illnesses three years before the war stayed home. If the war hadn't caused any problems, why didn't the soldiers have fewer hospitalizations? Something made the deployed sicker after the war to make the hospitalization rate exactly balanced."
According to Haley's computation, the Gulf War vets had an 8 percent higher hospitalization rate than the soldiers who stayed home. "This is a devastating criticism," he says. "Their study is going down in flames."
The mortality study also found that Gulf War veterans were not dropping dead at a higher rate than non-deployed servicemen. But they did suffer a 48 percent increase in deaths from auto accidents--a fact Haley says might be attributed to brain injury. "If you had dizzy episodes or nerve damage that slowed your reflexes, wouldn't that impair your driving?" he asks.
Some recent developments have bolstered the initial work done by the Texas doctors. In a paper released several weeks ago, Japanese physicians who conducted follow-up studies on the victims of the Tokyo subway sarin poisoning in 1995 found that low-dose exposure did cause long-term neurological damage. Those who suffered very slight symptoms at the time--headaches, burning eyes, runny nose, stomachaches--started developing "significant" balance disturbances more than six to eight months after the terrorist attack.
The Pentagon also found that rats exposed to low levels of sarin developed brain damage similar to that found in humans with memory loss. (The results of this study were published the same month--January 1997--as Haley's, but the Pentagon curiously did not publicize them until months later.) The government is now funding numerous studies on the effects of low-level exposure to organophosphates, and the military is conducting studies on the synergistic effects of exposure to combinations of chemicals.
Haley has finished surveying 400 Dallas-area Gulf War veterans, and the results corroborate his earlier findings linking chemical exposure to three distinct patterns of symptoms. Charles Townsend is in this group of veterans. The thoroughness of Haley's tests and surveys have given Townsend hope that doctors finally may get to the bottom of what ails him.
"He is more upbeat than I've seen him in years," says his sister, Sharon Brewer.
Their studies also indicate that older veterans were more susceptible to neurotoxicity, and Kurt, for one, is concerned that even soldiers with minimal symptoms might get worse as they age. He cites recent studies on Parkinson's disease that show that, in 50 percent of those afflicted, the illness is related to environmental exposures in their early years.
"We potentially could be sitting on a time bomb of neurological illness due to delayed onset," Kurt says.
None of these developments, however, has softened the initial criticisms leveled at the Texas scientists. Phil Landrigan, the White House panel member who wrote the JAMA editorial about Haley's studies, told PBS' Frontline that the work was seriously flawed. Frontline's hour-long documentary on Gulf War illnesses, which aired this January, presented stress as the only credible theory. The program featured Haley in passing, lumping him in with scientists who claim not only to have solved the mystery, but also to have discovered miracle cures. The program failed to point out that, unlike Haley, these scientists have yet to get their results published.
The PBS report caused a split in the ranks of the presidential advisory committee. Rolando Rios, a San Antonio lawyer and Vietnam veteran who served on the panel, told the Dallas Observer he thought the PAC's final report as well as the Frontline piece did Haley a disservice. "I do not think his work should be dismissed out of hand," he says. "I think his work deserves more funding."
As the threat of renewed U.S. military action in Iraq continues, it is unclear whether Haley's findings have influenced the Pentagon to take additional precautions in safeguarding troops from chemical exposures. One Pentagon spokesman said that the military is again issuing PB tablets to the soldiers. Beyond that, details are sketchy. "Making that information known would be like telling what time is the sneak attack," says Maj. Tom Gilroy.
As with Galileo and Copernicus before them, Haley and his UT Southwestern colleagues may be scientists who are simply ahead of their time. Or maybe time will prove them wrong.
Haley remains philosophical. "It's an honest disagreement between scientists who fervently believe their theories are right. It is not an evil plot, as some people believe. There's not a conspiracy to defraud or cheat the veterans. But there may be as many as 100,000 vets not getting help, and the impasse is tragic."
The disagreement between scientists may be honest, but it is far from civil. As Haley concluded in his recent lecture to medical students, "With all the attacks and counterattacks, you can see we are in the middle of a bloody scientific war. And it is about to get bloodier.
