Extensively used by US forces in Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and by Israel in the 1982 siege of West Beirut, cluster bombs have received severe condemnation from human rights and humanitarian organisations. There is consensus in the international community that these weapons are unacceptable and in breach of international humanitarian law, with many calling for a morator...

Risk factors associated with war-zone events and circumstances are implicated in the health and adjustment of military veterans. We assessed a national stratified sample of community-residing veterans of the Gulf War (N = 357) using scales from the Deployment Risk and Resilience Inventory, along with an array of mental (posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety), physical (symptom ...

The authors estimated the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and illness resembling chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in the entire population of Gulf War and non-Gulf-War veterans. They also evaluated the relation between the extent of deployment-related stress and the risk of either PTSD or CFS. In 1995-1997, the authors conducted a health survey in which these two symptom-based...

Burning of nearly 700 Kuwaiti oil wells and storage tanks during the Persian Gulf war made a severe impact on the environment of the region by emitting about 5000 tons of smoke daily. The fall out of smoke plumes in forms of dry and wet deposition reached even to the center and north of Iran. The majority of the rich and productive rangelands in the southern parts of Iran were strongly marked b...

BACKGROUND At least one-fourth of U.S. veterans who served in the 1990-1991 Gulf War are affected by the chronic symptomatic illness known as Gulf War illness (GWI). Clear determination of the causes of GWI has been hindered by many factors, including limitations in how epidemiologic studies have assessed the impact of the complex deployment environment on veterans' health. OBJECTIVE We sough...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study is to determine whether Gulf war veterans and their partners are at increased risk of adverse reproductive events and whether their children have increased risk of serious health problems. Methods and response to the study are reported here. METHODS This was a retrospective cohort study of reproduction among UK Gulf war veterans, with a comparison cohort of Ar...

Prospect theory is an influential psychological theory that describes how individuals make decisions involving risk. One of its key findings is that decision-makers are risk averse when in a ―domain of gain‖ (when they have experienced success), and risk acceptant when in a ―domain of loss‖ (when they have experienced setbacks). In this paper, I use prospect theory to examine George H. W. Bush’...

Increasing evidence suggests excess illness in Persian Gulf War veterans (GWV) can be explained in part by exposure of GWV to organophosphate and carbamate acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEis), including pyridostigmine bromide (PB), pesticides, and nerve agents. Evidence germane to the relation of AChEis to illness in GWV was assessed. Many epidemiological studies reported a link between AC...

For 15 years, the debate about depleted uranium (DU) and its detrimental effects on the health of veterans of the Gulf War of 1991, on the Iraqi people and military (and subsequently on the people of Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq during the second war) has remained unresolved. Meanwhile, the number of Gulf War veterans who have developed the so-called Gulf War syndrome has risen to about one-th...

Iraq’s agricultural sector represents a small, but vital component of Iraq’s economy. Over the past several decades agriculture’s role in the economy has been heavily influenced by Iraq’s involvement in military conflicts, particularly the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and the 1991 Gulf War, and by varying degrees of government efforts to promote and/or control agricultural production. In the mid-1980s...