In 2014, the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine (IOM)—contracted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for the task—released a report concluding that the creation of a new case definition for chronic multisymptom illness in Gulf War veterans was not possible because of insufficient evidence in published studies regarding its onset, duration, severity, frequency of symptoms, exclusionary criteria, and laboratory findings. Instead, the report recommended the use of two case definitions, the "Kansas" definition and the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)" definition, noting: "There is a set of symptoms (fatigue, pain, neurocognitive) that are reported in all the studies that have been reviewed. The CDC definition captures those three symptoms; the Kansas definition also captures them, but it also includes the symptoms reported most frequently by Gulf War veterans. "The Kansas case definition is more specific and may be more applicable for research settings, while the CDC case definition is more broad and may be more applicable for clinical settings. Classification
Medical ailments associated with service in the 1990–1991 Gulf War have been recognized by both the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.Before 1998, the terms Gulf War syndrome, Gulf War veterans illness, unexplained illness, and undiagnosed illness were used interchangeably to describe chronic unexplained symptoms in veterans of the 1991 Gulf War.
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.