All news on this page courtesy of the The Telegraph Newspaper, London, UK


Questions raised in desert stay unanswered

By Robert Fox

27 Febrary 1997

THE Royal British Legion has welcomed the Government's admission that mistakes made by MoD officials led to a delay in recognising the role played by organophosphate (OP) pesticides in the Gulf conflict, and may have contributed to the long-term The Legion, in alliance with several ex-Service charities, is now handling the cases of up to 1,500 former servicemen and women who claimed to have suffered from their time in the Gulf - roughly two per cent of the British force sent there.

"There is still too much unexplained in the background to this story," the Legion's controller of welfare, Terry English, said yesterday. He pointed out that the possibility that the use of organophosphate pesticides had been reported to the MoD two year He condemned the MoD's "delay in acknowledging their error which could have proved fatal for veterans who became seriously ill".

A United States National Institutes of Health inquiry looked at pesticides as a possible cause of illnesses reported by Gulf veterans. This has been acknowledged in the report by the Permanent Under Secretary at the MoD, Sir Richard Mottram, to the Defen Mr English said he was still handling "new, and very distressing cases". One serving officer had recently come to his office saying that he had been ill after serving in the Gulf, and had recently been diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis.

"He said he didn't think anything more about the connection with the Gulf, until he discovered that the man he shared his tent with had died of Alzheimer's disease at the age of 40."

A senior officer at the time of the Gulf campaign has said that a lack of available military medical staff, lack of training in desert warfare, and the mixed nature of medical teams, had led to confusion in the measures against the threat of Iraqi chemic "Our teams were not geared for war in the desert," he said. Since British forces left Libya in the early 1970s, there has been little opportunity for training in desert warfare. "We had gone off the boil."

When British units went to north Africa in 1941, they suffered badly from fly-borne diseases. Fearing a repetition of the experience, medical teams purchased pesticides locally when the 1st UK Armoured Division deployed in the Saudi Arabian desert in 199 According to military sources, there was a lack of co-ordination between the Royal Army Medical Corps with the frontline troops, the environmental health teams, and the chemical warfare decontamination units.

"We had to call up doctors serving with the Territorial Army, and some of the environmental health and decontamination teams were from countries as diverse as Canada, Romania, and Czechoslovakia," said a retired officer. "There was little evaluation of a Some of the organosphosphate pesticides were bought locally - and the packaging gave little indication as to how they were to be used. Some pesticide was shipped out from Britain, according to the British Legion, and this should have been known at the Mo On arrival in Saudi Arabia at the end of 1990, British troops were given injections against chemical and biological warfare. One commander became so ill that he demanded a full report from the Medical Corps on the nature of the inoculations, and their li As the units went forward to prepare for the advance into Iraq and Kuwait, soldiers were given injections and tablets, such as the Nerve Agent Pretreatement Set (NAPS). In tank units such as the 14/20th King's Hussars, injections against biological agent After the advance into Kuwait, the chemical pollution from oil fires became an added hazard. Some allied troops may have been at risk from setting fire to dumps of Iraqi chemical wepaons.

The Pentagon has revealed this week that up to 21,000 American troops could have been exposed to sarin nerve gas after military engineeers blew up an Iraqi weapons dump. Apparently, the CIA had prior information that the ammunition bunkers might contain Yesterday, service charities and Gulf veterans seemed to agree that the sickness now being reported by some 1,500 British soldiers and some 20,000 American veterans could come from a combination of causes.

Top of Page Current Section Index