ME and Ophelia

GULF-WAR SYNDROME
Shot in the arm

In March of this year, Sir Trevor McDonald, a leading news reader on British television, presented a special news night programme.

It featured a 30-minute report on anthrax vaccines and Gulf-war veterans who had become very ill and disabled.

The programme sent a reporter to the Dorset coast, here in England, where locals had found - washed up on the beach - unused phials of anthrax vaccine.

The locals kept what they had found, unopened.

The reporter took some of the phials back to London for laboratory testing.

They were found to contain traces of Squalene.

It was explained how even a tiny trace of Squalene, entering the human body, would result in the body's immune system attacking itself and cause Auto Immune Disease.

The programme also reported that Britain's Ministry of Defence (MOD) confirmed the phials did originate from the military but could not explain how the phials ended up, on a beach, in Dorset.

Here is an extract from The Economist article Shot in the arm:

In the body's fight against disease, immunisation is a powerful weapon. Like military training exercises, vaccines ready the immune system for battle against future attacks from nasty viruses or bacteria by providing a foretaste of infection when the body is at peace. But for some of those at war in the Gulf in the early 1990's, vaccines may have prompted certain illnesses even as they were preventing others.