Gulf War Illnesses

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 12:58 pm on 21 December 2004.

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Photo of Lord Turnberg Lord Turnberg Labour 12:58, 21 December 2004

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Morris of Manchester on securing this debate, on all the hard work he has done over the years for Gulf War syndrome sufferers, and on ensuring that this report was produced. I also commend the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, and his colleagues, Dr Norman Jones and Sir Michael Davies for producing the report. I believe that it is a very good summary of what is, to many, a very confusing picture. It has made a very good contribution to delineating what is fact and what is opinion. Teasing through this thicket of fact and fiction has been no easy task.

It is hard not to be moved by the suffering described by the many Gulf War veterans who gave evidence to the inquiry. There is no doubt that they have been, and are, ill, and some are very ill indeed. The question which had to be answered was whether this undoubted illness was due to their having been in the Gulf in 1991. The answer to that specific question is yes, at least for many.

The evidence for that is now pretty clear and has emerged from a number of studies. Perhaps the most convincing of those, at least to me, is that of Professor Simon Wessely at King's College, who published his work in the British Medical Journal in December 2003. He studied a very large group of several thousand Gulf War veterans and compared them with a very strictly controlled group of war veterans who had been in Bosnia. They were well matched in every way, and he showed quite clearly that ill health of one sort of another, whatever that was, occurred twice as commonly in the Gulf veterans than in the Bosnian veterans. That figure of twice the number of subjects with symptoms was confirmed by Professor Nicola Cherry in another well controlled study.

It is also of some interest, and perhaps part of the problem, that the types of symptoms and illnesses suffered were very similar in the two groups. Veterans got them twice as often if they had been in the Gulf than if they had been in Bosnia.

That similarity of symptoms makes it very difficult to ascribe any single individual's particular case to the Gulf, since the same symptoms may occur in any veteran and, indeed, in the general public. That is why it has been so important to carry out these types of carefully controlled epidemiological studies—to nail down the fact that there was indeed something more going on in the Gulf. In the absence of any more specific symptoms or tests, we do not have much else to go on.

There is one set of statistics to which the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, referred, which is reassuring, at least so far. There do not seem to have been any more veterans dying in the 13 years since the Gulf War than veterans of other wars, and considerably fewer than in an age and sex-matched control group from the general population. If it is any compensation—although possibly not much—it seems that veterans of any conflict can look forward to living longer than the rest of us.

Once we get beyond the fact that something different was indeed going on in the Gulf which contributed to subsequent ill health, we are in the realms of increasing uncertainty. For example, although a number of researchers have made valiant efforts to demonstrate specific defects in the brain, the nerves or the blood, these can be regarded only as interesting but unproven. More research is needed to see whether they are real. This area of research is bedevilled by methodological problems and it is easy to get misled by enthusiasm.

Furthermore, there is a long list of potential culprits which might have caused the illnesses. My current favourite is the multiple vaccines they were given, perhaps with the pyridostigmine in the NAPS they took. Others no doubt will have their own favourite culprit. However, the point is that in the absence of stronger evidence than we have at present, we may argue until the cows come home about what might have caused it. Yet, meanwhile, we must face the fact that whatever the cause or causes, the set of symptoms which make up the Gulf War syndrome exist and patients suffer.

Of course more research is necessary if we are to avoid the same mistakes in the future, but meanwhile, and despite the difficulties in making a clear-cut definitive diagnosis, these veterans who are suffering should receive some compensation. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will recognise that not to do so now will increasingly be seen as not only unwarranted but uncaring, especially at a time when we have cause to be particularly grateful to our troops in the field.