Panel Suggests Federal Program To Aid Mysteriously Ill War Veterans
WASHINGTON-A presidential panel, warning that the government's credibility was at stake,
urged the Clinton Administration Friday to seek enactment of a "permanent,
statutory" program of benefits and health care for the thousands of veterans who have
been stricken with mysterious ailments after serving in the Persian Gulf War.
Such a program would reassure the ailing veterans that the government intends to make good
on promises to care for their undiagnosed sicknesses, the Presidential Advisory Committee
on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses declared as it approved its final recommendations at a
meeting in Alexandria, Virginia.
Committee members, meeting for the last time after two years of study, combined their
potentially costly recommendation with warnings that they had failed to uncover any single
source of the myriad of illnesses that many veterans contend were caused by their service
during the brief 1991 war.
"I want to caution the veterans that we may never know what is the cause of their
illnesses...There may be answers, but there may not ever be answers," said Andrea
Kidd Taylor, a health policy consultant who served on the panel.
Spokesmen for the Department of Veterans Affairs and several legislators applauded the
committee's recommendations. VA officials said the department had made "an implicit
commitment to provide lifelong health care" to the Gulf War veterans and said it
supported "the overall intent" of the recommendations.
The committee also voted to recommend that the White House strip the Defense Department of
control of ongoing studies of low levels of exposures to chemical and biological warfare
agents, saying the military's objectivity was in question. The committee, which has been
harshly critical of the Pentagon's years of denial that U.S. troops were exposed to
chemical agents during the war, had considered making such a recommendation in an earlier
report but had dropped the proposal.
Friday, the committee sent its recommendations to President Clinton without debate. The
call for independent review of the Pentagon research reflected what committee chair Joyce
Lashof described as the continuing tension between the Defense Department and the panel.
The committee did not place a price tag on the proposed program.