Milking Gulf War Syndrome for all its worth

From The Washington Post:

Fifteen years after the end of the 1991 war with Iraq, a Texas researcher is in line to get as much as $75 million in federal funding to press his studies of "Gulf War syndrome," even though most other scientists long ago discounted his theories.

Epidemiologist Robert W. Haley has been trying for 10 years to prove that thousands of Persian Gulf War troops were poisoned by a combination of nerve gas, pesticides, insect repellents and a nerve-gas antidote. With the help of $16 million in past funding obtained by his backers in Congress and the Pentagon, Haley has argued that his "toxicity hypothesis" is the best explanation for the constellation of physical complaints that many veterans reported after returning from the Gulf.

Haley and his supporters, who also include a powerful cluster of veterans and government advisers, are undeterred by the scientific consensus against him.

As recently as September, a panel of the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine reached the same conclusion that half a dozen other expert groups had: Gulf War syndrome does not exist. After reviewing 850 studies -- essentially all the scientific literature on the topic -- the 13 scientists wrote that "the nature of the symptoms suffered by many Gulf War veterans does not point to an obvious diagnosis, etiology [cause], or standard treatment."

In any group of people as large as the pool of men who served in the first Gulf War over the amount of time which has passed since the end of that war you are going to see a certain percentage of them experiencing health problems.

Much of what the Gulf War veterans are experiencing can be explained by nothing more mysterious than advancing age. Others were exposed to discrete toxins such as the dust from depleted uranium projectiles, or pesticides or even some of Saddam's chemical weapons. Many different causes bring about many different medical conditions.

It should go without saying that the more extreme and implausible of the reported symptoms such as glowing vomit are the products of either mental disturbance or outright fraud.

The entire "Gulf War Syndrome" phenomena is the result of a handful of veterans looking for a paycheck or attention (or both) and researchers looking for grant money and left-wing politicians looking for some way to throw mud on George H W Bush's outstanding victory in the Gulf War.

The great lesson here is that there is no area of scientific inquiry so ill founded or unlikely to produce results that hack scientists will not line up for taxpayer's money to research it.

Citizens and politicians contemplating requests for money to conduct embryonic stem cell research should keep this in mind.