By Charles Aldinger
WASHINGTON, Oct 20 (Reuters) -- The Pentagon said in a report released Tuesday that the drug pyridostigmine bromide (PB), given to some 250,000 US troops in the 1991 Gulf War to protect against nerve gas, could have caused chronic illness in thousands of those troops.
Senior defense officials, however, also told reporters that they would not rule out the use of pyridostigmine bromide in the future if American forces were threatened with imminent attack by the lethal, fast-acting nerve agent soman.
"This is an era in which we are not only protecting our troops from bullets and bombs. This is an era in which one deep breath can kill," Assistant Defense Secretary for Health Affairs Sue Bailey said at a news conference.
The Pentagon and the Rand Corporation think tank, which did the study on PB, cautioned that the study simply failed to rule out the cause of at least some Gulf War illnesses by the protective tablet PB. That did not mean, they stressed, that the drug actually caused long-term complaints in Gulf War veterans ranging from sleeplessness to chronic muscle problems.
More than 100,000 of the nearly 700,000 US troops sent to the Gulf for the war against Iraq have reported experiencing a wide range of medical ills, including muscle aches, chronic fatigue, memory loss and sleep disorders. No cause has yet been found for the problems despite a concerted effort by the government.
The Department of Defense said on Tuesday that further studies were being done, but it noted that use of PB in advance of any attack was the only known protection against soman, which can cause death almost instantly.
"We certainly cannot rule out using PB to protect our forces in the future," said Bailey. Bailey and other officials said that the "bar has been raised" in adding caution to any future use of PB and that the department would have to be fairly certain an attack was imminent before it was distributed to troops.
"Were I to know that we were under threat of imminent attack -- and I know that I would not survive because there is no antidote that would work without PB -- I would take PB," Bailey told reporters.
The 385-page report, written by Dr. Beatrice Alexandra Golomb for Rand, was based partly on findings from a large number of medical studies on PB and its effects. It cited, for example, studies by the University of Texas and Duke University that concluded that PB could cause nerve damage when mixed with other chemicals.
The drug was given to some 250,000 troops sent to the Gulf in 1990 and 1991 as a "pretreatment" for potential Iraqi attacks with the nerve agent soman. The drug has been used since 1955 to treat a rare neurological disorder, but its effectiveness against soman is still regarded as virtually experimental.
Bailey and Dr. Bernard Rostker, who heads the Pentagon's effort to uncover the causes of the so-called "Gulf War Illness", stressed that PB had been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as "an investigational new drug."
"A great frustration is that we haven't found a single cause of Gulf War illnesses. I am not sure we will ever find a single cause," added Rostker, who promised to continue the Defense Department probe.
