To the Editor: In “Reemergence of Plasmodium vivax malaria in the Republic of Korea” (1), the term eradication was, in my judgment, inappropriately used. In 1981, Yekutiel proposed that eradication is “The purposeful reduction of specific disease prevalence to the point of continued absence of transmission within a specified area by means of a time limited campaign” (2). In 1984, Hinman propose...

Recent research demonstrated a relation between traumatic brain injury (TBI), health symptoms and diagnosis of Gulf War Illness (GWI) in Gulf War Veterans, but no study has examined the impact of multiple mild TBIs (mTBIs). A total of 229 male Gulf War Veterans from the Ft Devens Cohort were categorized by a number of mTBIs reported. One-way ANOVA and chi-square test of independence were used t...

Reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) was used for polyribonucleotide assays with sera from deployed Persian Gulf War veterans with the Gulf War Syndrome and a cohort of nonmilitary controls. Sera from veterans contained polyribonucleotides (amplicons) that were obtained by RT-PCR and that ranged in size from 200 to ca. 2,000 bp. Sera from controls did not contain amplicons larger than 450 bp. DNA...

Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare 2 INTRODUCTION " Gas! Gas! " This warning cry, so common in World War I, almost became real to U.S. forces again as they prepared to liberate Kuwait in late 1990. The threat of chemical, and even biological, warfare was foremost in the minds of U.S. military personnel during Operation Desert Shield, the preparation for the Persian Gulf War. Ira...

BACKGROUND To test the psychometric properties of the Persian version of Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI-12) in the Iranian population. METHODS After translating and cultural adaptation of the questionnaire into Persian, 100 caregiver spouses of Iran- Iraq war (1980-88) veterans with chronic spinal cord injury who live in the city of Mashhad, Iran, invited to participate in the study. The Persian...

Laos is a small country about the size of Utah. A Lao physician jokingly told me with a sad smile that "Americans thought Laos was a part of Vietnam during the war." The war in Laos was, however, an intentional secret war. The number of bombs dropped during the Vietnam War was greater than the bombs dropped in Europe during World War II. This bombing, which left an enormous number ofUXOs (unexp...

OBJECTIVES We estimated war-related Iraqi mortality for the period 1980 through 1993. METHOD To test our hypothesis that deaths reported by siblings (even dating back several decades) would correspond with war events, we compared sibling mortality reports with the frequency of independent news reports about violent historic events. We used data from a survey of 4,287 adults in 2000 Iraqi hous...

BACKGROUND Epidemiologic studies have implicated wartime exposures to acetylcholinesterase (AChE)-inhibiting chemicals as etiologic factors in Gulf War illness (GWI), the multisymptom condition linked to military service in the 1991 Gulf War. It is unclear, however, why some veterans developed GWI while others with similar exposures did not. Genetic variants of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase ...