The term chronic multisymptom illness (CMI) was first used following publication of a 1998 study describing chronic unexplained symptoms in Air Force veterans of the 1991 Gulf War.In a 2014 report contracted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine recommended the use the term Gulf War illness rather than chronic multisymptom illness. Since that time, relevant publications by the National Academy of Science and the U.S. Department of Defense have used only the term Gulf War illness (GWI).The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) confusingly still uses an array of both old and new terminology for Gulf War illness. VAs specialty clinical evaluation War Related Illness and Injury Study Centers (WRIISCs) use the recommended term Gulf War illness, as do VAs Office of Research and Development (VA-ORD) and many recent VA research publications. However, VAs Public Health website still uses Gulf War veterans medically unexplained illnesses, chronic multi-symptom illness (CMI), and undiagnosed illnesses, but explains that VA doesnt use the term Gulf War syndrome because of varying symptoms.The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) originally classified individuals with related ailments believed to be connected to their service in the Persian Gulf a special non-ICD-9 code DX111, as well as ICD-9 code V65.5. Kansas definition
In 1998, the State of Kansas Persian Gulf Veterans Health Initiative sponsored an epidemiological survey led by Dr. Lea Steele of deployment-related symptoms in 2,030 Gulf War veterans.
It recommended that Congress increase funding for treatment-focused Gulf War illness research to at least $60 million per year.In March 2013, a hearing was held before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Veterans Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, to determine not whether Gulf War illness exists, but rather how it is identified, diagnosed and treated, and how the tools put in place to aid these efforts have been used.By 2016, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) concluded there was sufficient evidence of a positive association between deployment to the 1990–1991 Gulf War and Gulf War illness. Jones controversy
Louis Jones Jr., the perpetrator of the 1995 murder of Tracie McBride, stated that the Gulf War syndrome caused him to commit the crime and he sought clemency, hoping to avoid the death penalty given to him by a federal court. Jones was executed in 2003. Related legislation
On March 14, 2014, Representative Mike Coffman introduced the Gulf War Health Research Reform Act of 2014 (H.R. 4261; 113th Congress) into the United States House of Representatives, where it passed the House by unanimous consent but then died in Congress when the Senate failed to take action on it. The bill would have altered the relationship between the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses (RAC) and the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) under which the RAC is constituted.