Navy News Comments on My Iraq War Predictions
Majid Ali, M.D.
In my book The Canary and Chronic Fatigue (1994), I made some predictions about chronic illness related to environmental exposures during the first Gulf War. On September 13, 1995, Navy News ran a front page story about how my predictions came true. Below is some text from the Navy News article which I reproduced in my book September Eleven, 2005 which was published in February 2002 as a book of predictions written in a fictionalized past tense.
Navy News, September 13, 1995
“Long before the first veterans returned from the Persian Gulf Dr. Majid Ali, associate professor of pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York, and Director of the Department of Pathology, Immunology and Laboratories at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, NJ, predicted five outcomes.
* That a large number of servicemen and women in the Persian Gulf region would return with a variety of chronic environmental, immune and stress related problems;
* That disabling fatigue would be a dominant clinical feature while other symptoms would include recurrent infection, food allergy reactions, abdominal problems, disorders of mood and memory, and skin rashes, among others;
* That sick veterans would initially be dismissed as malingerers and labeled with various psychiatric diagnoses and prescribed large doses of mind numbing drugs;
* That the chronic health disorders of these veterans would worsen with multiple drug therapies; and
* That when everything else failed, these veterans would be prescribed long term broad spectrum antibiotic therapy that would play further havoc with their bowel systems.
Five years later these predictions are now observable facts. Headlines debate the cause and fate of those men and women who left healthy and returned home sick—nearly 75,000 at last count.”
