"Officials from the hospital and VA, which is funding the program, signed the formal partnership agreement Friday."
Posted on Fri, Apr. 21, 2006
UT Southwestern gets $75 million for Gulf War illness study
ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/14400239.htm
DALLAS - When a few doctors began researching the memory loss, dizziness and
loss of motor functions of some soldiers who had returned from the first Gulf
War, they relied on private funding because of widespread skepticism about the
illness.
But the government and medical community took notice after a 1997 study
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that the
veterans had brain damage, not a psychological condition or stress. Attitudes
slowly began changing, and a study a few years later showed that one in seven
Gulf War veterans is sick.
Now the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas will receive
$15 million a year for five years and is the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs' designated Gulf War illness research center. Officials from the
hospital and VA, which is funding the program, signed the formal partnership
agreement Friday.
"Any time you have a new idea everybody's skeptical," said Dr. Robert Haley, who
has led Gulf War illness studies - including the 1997 one - for more than a
decade at the Dallas research hospital. "The Defense Department is fully bought
in to what we're doing; the VA is fully bought in. Everybody's working together
now, as you see today, to try to come up with a solution."
Texas has more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans, second only to North Carolina.
Nearly 700,000 soldiers served in the Gulf War in the early 1990s.
UT Southwestern's main goal is to develop a test to diagnose the illness. The
hospital conducts studies using an MRI with a powerful magnet that reveals more
detailed images of brain functions, Haley said. Scans are taken while patients
are asked to do tasks, such as identify pictures they recognize.
Hospital officials plan to buy a second MRI in the next year for the Dallas VA
Hospital, where veterans ultimately can be diagnosed and treated in the coming
years and the program expanded to other VA hospitals nationwide, Haley said.
"This has been beyond the reach of science," Haley said. "Everybody realizes
we're on the verge of a real breakthrough here."
Haley and UT Southwestern began researching the illness in 1994 at the request
of Texas billionaire businessman Ross Perot, whose help was sought by about a
dozen soldiers suffering from symptoms, including disabilities in their
children.
Perot said the topic was controversial because the government considered it "a
100-hour non-war - a heck of an insult for these men who had fought for our
country." Perot ended up giving more than $2 million to the hospital for
research over the next few years, Haley said.
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison helped secure government funding in 1998, and the
newly designated $75 million over the next five years was a provision sponsored
by Hutchison in a spending bill for military construction and VA programs.
She said Friday that the research would help not only soldiers but farmers and
others affected by chemicals such as pesticides.
"I also wanted to look to the future because we are going to have chemical
warfare someday, I'm sure, and I want to be prepared for that," said Hutchison,
R-Texas.