Old War, New Victims

By Sora Song

Two new studies in the journal Neurology suggest a link between service in the 1991 Gulf War and an increased risk of contracting ALS, the deadly and incurable illness better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The studies used different methods but came to the same conclusion: veterans of the war are at least twice as likely as the rest of the population to develop the degenerative disease before age 45. One suspected culprit is exposure to poisonous sarin gas. --S.S.