Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/11/96, ©1996

Gulf War Illness Linked to Iraqi Germ Weapons

Gene Altered Bacterium Found in Vets’ Blood

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Seattle, Washington.; Dec. 11, 1996
By Ed Offley, P-I Military Writer 

Seattle-- Evidence exists that could link the ailments of sick Persian Gulf War
veterans to Iraqi biological weapons, independent medical researchers warn.  

Such weapons pose a more serious health threat than chemical agents because
they are designed to spread germs throughout a wide population, including
soldiers, their spouses, children and even family pets, experts say. And, they
say, symptoms can appear years after exposure.

   While the Pentagon has acknowledged that U.S. troops in the Gulf War were
exposed to chemical agents, officials said they still are checking data on
biological weapons.

   Garth Nicolson, a research biochemist who has tested the blood of hundreds 
of sick Gulf War veterans and members of their families, said he has
discovered a mycoplasma - a primitive bacterium - that had been genetically
altered in many of the samples. The only logical conclusion to draw, he said,
was that the germ had been deliberately manipulated for use as a weapon.

   ``We found very unusual infections that have genetic structures not found
in the wild,'' said Nicolson, scientific director of the non-profit Institute 
for Molecular Medicine in Irvine, Calif.

   Given the artificial structure of the bacterium, its widespread detection among hundreds of Gulf War veterans and their families, and Iraq's confirmed
work on such weapons, Nicolson said, he concluded that people are sick as a 
result of ``invasive . . . biological weapons.''

   In separate interviews, two experts in related medical fields confirmed the
validity of Nicolson's research. They also shared most of Nicolson's premise 
that many Gulf War veterans show signs of bacteriological infection and not
chemical poisoning.

   Whether Gulf War troops were exposed deliberately or accidentally is not
clear. It is possible, for instance, that exposure occurred when biological
agents were dispersed into the air as a result of allied bombing of Iraqi
storage bunkers, Nicolson and other experts said.

   Nicolson and his wife, Nancy, both of whom are biomedical researchers, 
became interested in the issue when their daughter, an Army soldier, returned
from the war with multiple ailments.

   Defense Secretary William Perry said last week there is no evidence U.S.
Gulf War troops were exposed to Iraqi biological weapons. But, Perry said, 
``since we know that the Iraqis had the weapons, we have to continue to
examine data and we cannot categorically rule it out.'' Earlier, the Pentagon
ended more than five years of denial and admitted that thousands of soldiers
in the war were exposed to chemical agents.

   Biological warfare uses bacteriological agents that are infectious and can
cause illness and death not just after initial contact but even years later,
Nicolson said. Chemical warfare agents, in contrast, are chemical compounds 
that attack the skin and nervous system but can be washed off. They leave
victims sick but not infectious.

   Since the seven-week Gulf War, which began Jan. 17, 1991, tens of thousands
of veterans and their family members have complained of a wide array of
ailments, including memory lapses, chronic fatigue, aching joints, dizziness
and benign tumors. Some veterans have reported children born with severe birth
defects. The ailments are loosely classified as Gulf War syndrome. But the
cause remains under debate.

   Complicating the issue is the fact, discovered in 1994 during a Senate Banking 
Committee investigation, that even three years after the war the
Pentagon had no means to detect biological warfare agents on the battlefield.
   John Deutch, then-deputy secretary of defense and now head of the CIA, told
a government conference in New Mexico in 1994 that the United States has ``no
biological-detection capability deployed with any forces, anywhere,'' the
Banking Committee noted in a report after its investigation.

   The year before, according to the Banking Committee report, Deutch said
that the Department of Defense was ``withholding classified information on the
exposure of U.S. forces (in the Gulf War) to biological materials.''

   The report contained the results of a survey of 4,000 veterans reporting
medical symptoms after serving in the Gulf War. It noted that 77 percent of
their spouses and 65 percent of their children showed similar symptoms.
   Since 1991, the Pentagon, Veterans Administration and a number of federal
scientific organizations have studied the widespread rash of illnesses
afflicting between 35,000 Gulf War veterans (the VA's estimate) and as many as 100,000 veterans and family members (the estimate by outside researchers, such
as Nicolson). 

   The Pentagon initially said veterans reporting ailments were suffering from
psychological stress. Before the Pentagon admitted last week that nerve agents
may have been dispersed over the battlefield, theories about the cause of the
ailments included exposure to pollution from oil-field fires, reaction to
experimental vaccines or parasitic infections, such as leishmaniasis found in
the desert environment.

   Garth  and Nancy Nicolson, who hold doctorates in biochemistry and 
biophysics, respectively, say a growing number of veterans and their families
still are becoming sick in the years since the Gulf War ended.

   Their research is supported by other experts.

   Charles Hinshaw of Wichita, Kan., former president of the American Academy
of Environmental Medicine, reviewed the scientific procedure Nicolson used to 
detect the genetically manipulated bacterium. Hinshaw said of Nicolson's work, 
``The scientific techniques used to identify the (bacterium) in these Gulf War veterans is valid.''

   Ed Hyman, a New Orleans-based specialist in kidney and urinary tract
medicine who was cited by the Senate Banking Committee in 1994 for his work
with sick Gulf War veterans, said that he, too, has found a bacterial link to
Gulf War syndrome.

   Hyman said he concluded that the ailments stem from a source that is either
a bacterium that exists in the desert environment or a biological warfare
agent.

   ``I think the best bet is (a bacterium) endemic to that region. The
second-best bet is germ warfare,'' he said.

   Hyman supported Nicolson's assertion that chemical agents such as sarin 
could not cause symptoms among family members of veterans.
   ``Once a person is damaged by sarin there's no way they can pass it on to
their wife and children,'' he said of the veterans. ``The Nicolsons are dead 
right about it.''

   The Nicolsons and Hinshaw also said they have received information from 
colleagues in the Persian Gulf region that the type of illness afflicting U.S.
veterans is rampant among the civilian populations there, particularly in
Iraq, Kuwait, northern Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

   A survey of Iraqi health conditions published in March by the United
Nations World Health Organization disclosed ``an explosive rise'' in the
incidence of diseases in Iraq since the war, including cholera, typhoid,
malaria and meningitis.'' The U.N. agency report attributes the health crisis
to the deterioration of the medical system, breakdown in water and sewage
treatment, and hardships caused by economic sanctions.

   The U.N. agency also documented a fivefold increase in reported cases of
leishmaniasis between 1989 and 1992, from 2,159 cases to 12,645 per 100,000
population.

   There also is evidence Iraq's infant mortality rate increased after the
war. No studies have suggested a connection between the deaths and possible
exposure to chemical or biological agents.

   A study of Iraqi civilians comparing records before the war and in late 1991, 
conducted by the International Team on the Gulf Crisis, found a 380
percent increase in the mortality rate of children under 5. The survey
attributed this to ``a complex interaction of factors,'' including shortages
of food and medicine, lack of clean water and poor sanitation.

   The survey, funded by UNICEF, the MacArthur Foundation and other
organizations, also noted epidemic outbreaks of typhoid, cholera, hepatitis,
measles and tetanus throughout Iraq.

   Hinshaw said a Kuwaiti physician told him an ailment mirroring Gulf War
syndrome is widespread among the Kuwaiti population.
   ``The word is the Kuwaitis have this (illness) and the Kuwaiti government
is suppressing this whole issue,'' Hinshaw said.

   Neither the Pentagon nor Veterans Affairs Department have compared health
data on Gulf War veterans and Iraqi civilians with the government of Iraq,
officials said.

   ``There is currently no cooperation in health programs between the United
States and Iraq in looking at Gulf War illness,'' Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said yesterday.

   He said the Pentagon task force on Gulf War health issues had received
Nicolson's research findings and was reviewing them, along with other 
independent medical studies.

   ``We are interested in looking at all research that may help us better
understand the causes of Gulf War illness,'' Whitman said.

   Iraq's biological and chemical warfare capability never has been
questioned.

   U.S. military commanders during and after the Gulf War freely admitted
their greatest fear was that advancing allied units might get pinned down in
the Iraqi minefields and obstacle belts in Kuwait and Iraq, then slaughtered
by massive attacks with chemical and biological weapons.

   Then-Secretary of State James Baker explicitly warned Iraqi Foreign
Minister Tariq Aziz in a final diplomatic meeting Jan. 8, 1991, that the
United States would react in kind if Iraq used weapons of mass destruction 
against the allies. Lt. Gen. Calvin Waller, upon his return to I Corps and
Fort Lewis after a wartime assignment as deputy commander of all Desert Storm
troops, said in April 1991 that the U.S. military had positioned nuclear
weapons in the Persian Gulf region as a deterrent to Iraqi use of chemical or
biological weapons.

   As for Iraqi biological warfare capability, the Pentagon and the United
Nations reported after the war that Iraq possessed a sophisticated biological
warfare industry by the late 1980s.

   The Banking Committee probe found evidence Iraq was working on the
following biological warfare agents at the time of the Gulf War:
   --  Anthrax - An often fatal infections disease caused by the ingestion of
anthrax spores that blocks breathing and leads to fatal blood poisoning.
   --  Botulinium toxin - Symptoms of exposure, which is often fatal, are
vomiting, thirst, weakness, fever, dizziness and muscle paralysis.
   --  Other biological agents identified include histoplasma (similar to
tuberculosis), brucella melitensis (which causes damage to major internal organs), and clostridium perfringens, toxic bacteria that cause gangrene.

   Iraq started in 1986 to initiate an offensive biological warfare
capability, according to the U.N. special commission that investigated alleged
manufacturing and storage sites beginning in 1991. U.N. inspectors said that
while no explicit evidence of Iraqi biological weaponry was found, they noted
that the main site was razed by the Iraqi government a week before inspectors
were allowed in.

   The Senate Banking Committee also discovered that from 1986 to 1989 a
non-profit medical institute called the American Type Culture Collection
exported to Iraq, with approval of the U.S. Commerce Department, 70 shipments
of bacterial cultures that could have been used for producing biological
weapons.

   The newspaper Newsday on Nov. 27 reported that Joshua Lederberg, head of a
U.S. scientific panel that earlier had denied any links between biological
weapons and Gulf War syndrome, was a director of the American Type Culture
Collection.

   However, Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and former president
of Rockefeller University, told The New York Times on Monday that the Pentagon
had withheld key evidence from his panel, including the presence of chemical
agents at the Iraqi bunker complex blown up by U.S. troops.

   Lederberg said the disclosures mandate an intensified effort to determine
whether low doses of nerve gas can cause long-term illnesses.
   While the Nicolsons have specialized in microbiology and infectious 
illnesses for decades, it was their role as parents that first led them into
the hunt for the source of Gulf War syndrome.

   Their daughter, Sharron, served in Operation Desert Storm with the 101st
Air Assault Division, which made the deepest penetration into Iraqi territory
and from whose ranks many of the sick veterans have come, Nicolson said. She 
returned from the war with symptoms of Gulf War syndrome and has many friends
who also became sick, Garth Nicolson said.

   After compiling a database of common symptoms among ailing veterans,
Nicolson said, he and his wife began to suspect the immediate cause was an 
unknown ``mycoplasmic infection.'' Mycoplasmas, he explained, are small
micro-organisms related to bacteria, some of which can aggressively invade
blood cells.

   Using a technique he calls ``gene tracking,'' Nicolson in one study made a 
detailed analysis of the DNA structure of blood samples of several dozen sick
Gulf War veterans. He found that 45 percent of the sample group were victims
of an ``invasive'' mycoplasma that had ``penetrated deeply into the patients'
blood cells.''

   In analyzing the samples, Nicolson said, he discovered evidence of 
``genetic manipulation'' of the mycoplasma that converted it from a relatively
benign bacterium to ``a much more invasive and pathogenic
mechanism.''Preliminary surveys of veterans are turning up a possible pattern
of infection linked to specific areas of the battlefield.

   ``The soldiers that were involved in the deep (attacks) in Iraq and those
that were near Saudi and Kuwaiti Scud-B (missile) impact sites  . . . may be
at highest risk,'' Nicolson wrote in an article last May in The Townsend 
Letter for Doctors and Patients.

   Antibiotics tailored to treat the mycoplasma have helped alleviate symptoms
for many veterans, Nicolson said, but he noted that it is too early to know if*
the drugs will provide a permanent cure.

   Joyce Riley, a civilian intensive care nurse in Houston and co-founder of
the American Gulf War Veterans Association, said the group is compiling
extensive reports from sick veterans who say their family members and even
pets and domestic livestock also have become ill.

   Riley, an Air Force Reserve captain, said she developed symptoms while on
active duty in an Air Force C-130 unit during the war. But, Riley added, she
did not even travel to the Persian Gulf; her air crew ferried sick and injured
troops within the continental United States.

   She said a former Special Forces soldier with 22 years on active duty told
her last month that he called her group after military doctors could not
explain why his wife and two children also were plagued with symptoms of Gulf
War syndrome.

   ``I asked him, `Did your pets die?' '' Riley said.
   ``Yes,'' the soldier said. ``How did you know?''

   Riley said dead pets are common in reports the veterans association
receives from the 20 to 30 sick veterans who contact it each day.

   For the Nicolsons, perhaps the most startling information they have 
collected on Iraqi biological warfare turned up two years ago with a knock on
their front door in Houston.

   Nicolson said he and his wife were stunned to find an Iraqi army general 
standing on the doorstep. The middle-aged man in civilian clothes was sweating
profusely as he handed Nicolson a letter in Arabic and introduced himself in 
fluent English.

   ``He said he was sick with the Gulf War illness,'' recalled Nicolson, who 
at the time was chairman of the Tumor Biology Department at the University of
Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. ``He wanted to talk about it to see what
we knew about it.'' The Iraqi said he had learned of Nicolson through several of his articles in medical journals.

   ``He tested positive for this mycoplasmic infection,'' Nicolson said. 
   The Iraqi, who used an Iraqi diplomatic passport to travel quietly to
Texas, told the Nicolsons that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had deliberately
released biological agents in southern Iraq.

   ``He told us there were at least 300,000 (Iraqis) dead and 1 million sick
because of the release of chemical and biological weapons in southern Iraq,''
Nicolson said. Unofficial reports from medical colleagues at Mideast health 
research facilities indicate up to 25 percent of the populations of Kuwait,
Jordan, southern Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia are experiencing Gulf War
syndrome ailments.

   ``He (the Iraqi general) told us there were both chronic and acute
biological agents used in the Gulf War,'' Nicolson said.

   Mike Weber, a Fort Lewis-based soldier treated for tumors after serving
with an Army unit that blew up the Iraqi weapons bunker complex now confirmed
to have contained chemical agents, said recently that he recalled a radio news
item picked up shortly before the ground war began. ``The BBC reported Saddam
Hussein threatened not only the soldiers in the Gulf but (also) their wives
and babies as well,'' he said. ``Maybe this is what he meant.''