BACKGROUND US military engagements have consistently raised concern over the array of health outcomes experienced by service members postdeployment. Exploratory factor analysis has been used in studies of 1991 Gulf War-related illnesses, and may increase understanding of symptoms and health outcomes associated with current military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The objective of this study ...

€ Biological warfare vaccinations have been implicated as a cause of the increased rate of reported symptoms in Gulf War veteran. Our study group examined a group of 180 personnel who were prepared for Gulf deployment but were never actually sent. Their vaccination records were checked, and only 5 of 180 had any preparatory vaccinations, of which only one was a biological warfare vaccine. This ...

The Ethiopian-Jewish community in Israel is an immigrant population numbering 131 400 as of 2012. Many arrived from 1980 to 1992 by airborne operations coordinated by the Israeli government. Immigration was prompted by Israeli recognition of the community's Jewish citizenship eligibility status. This period in Israel's history saw the First Lebanon War, the First Intifada, the Gulf War and the ...

BACKGROUND A case definition of Gulf War illness with 3 primary variants, previously developed by factor analysis of symptoms in a US Navy construction battalion and validated in clinic veterans, identified ill veterans with objective abnormalities of brain function. This study tests prestated hypotheses of its external validity. METHODS A stratified probability sample (n = 8,020), selected f...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184832.].

Despite over US $200 million having been spent researching illnesses following the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, the nature and cause of such illnesses remains controversial. In this narrative review, we discuss some of the methodological issues that have affected epidemiological studies on this topic. These include low-response rates, ascertainment bias, recall bias, problems identifying suitable ...

In this context, the continued use of the word 'accident' causes me concern. Sir Francis Bacon wrote 'For men converse by means of language, but words are imposed according to the understanding of the crowd; and there arises from a bad and inapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind'. So I believe it is with the inapt word 'accident'. To 'the crowd' the word implies some sort o...

The symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) closely correspond to the physiological and behavioural sequelae of an interleukin-1 (IL-1) mediated sickness response. We propose that this response can account for the variability in its symptomatology. Furthermore, the persistence of GWS can be accounted for by an associative process, whereby the smells/tastes of war become linked with the physiologica...