VA may expand list of Gulf War illnesses

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Apr 1 2010

The Army Times/Veterans Today: "In a boost for veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and those who have served in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Veterans Affairs Department has proposed changes to its list of illnesses that are presumed connected to service to include nine infectious diseases."

"The expanded list also would include anything that can't be diagnosed — such as symptoms that could be related to exposure to smoke from open-air burn pits and the unexplained maladies broadly referred to as Gulf War illness." The list could also include "common infectious diseases in Iraq and Afghanistan: brucellosis, campylobacter jejuni, coxiella burnetii, malaria, mycobacterium tuberculosis, nontyphoid salmonella, shigella, visceral leishmaniasis and West Nile virus" (Kennedy, 3/30).

This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.