Testimony of Howard B. Urnovitz, Ph.D. (1/24/02)
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on
National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations
Howard B. Urnovitz, Ph.D. -- 01/24/2002
I am grateful to the Subcommittee for allowing me the opportunity to present my views
on Gulf War Syndrome or GWS. My name is Dr. Howard B. Urnovitz. I received my doctorate
degree in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Michigan in 1979. My entire
CV is submitted with my written testimony. I currently hold the position of Scientific
Director of the Chronic Illness Research Foundation as well as my current position as
Chief Executive and Science Officer of Chronix Biomedical, a privately-held genomics
company. I receive no government grants or support for my work.
The Subcommittee has asked me to testify on the status GWS research. My reply is simple:
We have reached a stalemate. My purpose of being here today is to explain why.
In my last
testimony to this Subcommittee, on February 2, 2000, I pointed out that the human
genome appeared to play a critical role in GWS. In fact, I testified that the major
opportunity GWS presents to medical science is that neither a single bacterium nor a virus
could be blamed for the illness. I have stated repeatedly in public for the past several
years that the mycoplasma causal theory for GWS was based on poorly conducted research and
the claims had never been validated. Finally, an excellent controlled scientific
study has put this matter to rest. I will state again for the record what I believe to
be the basis of GWS: it is the genome, not the germs.
So why is there a stalemate?
The letter from the Pentagon included in the GAO Report (GAO-01-13, April 2001) cautioned
the authors of the report not to be "hasty" in drawing the conclusion that there
might be fewer health complaints from the French troops. This letter indicated to me that
the military continues to take what I would call a "denial of the clues"
position. Denying or refusing to recognize scientific clues, controlled studies (including
ours) and even facts about GWS has created this stalemate, a stalemate that has
implications bigger than the disease itself. These denials are manifestations of the
weaknesses of large-scale, government-funded research. This weakness delays any and all
attempts to treat GWS veterans and hinders any and all attempts for a medical defense
against the next generation of chemical, biological and radiation terrorist weapons.
What is the source of this "denial of clues" position with regard to GWS and
other medical mysteries? I believe it is the US Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS). HHS is the largest and most powerful medical research entity in the world today. It
strongly influences the financing, communication, and priorities of the world's medical
research agenda, including military medicine. Its Fiscal Year 2001 budget was $429 billion. In my
opinion, this agency is completely out of control because of, in part, its continued
violations of medical ethics.
I argue that the response of the entire federal health establishment to recent acts of
bioterrorism constitutes a violation of medical ethics. Despite ample evidence from
military usage over the last decade that the existing anthrax vaccine is highly reactive
with possible deleterious long-term health effects, the October 2001 terrorist attack that
employed mailed anthrax spores triggered an extremely questionable reaction from the
Health and Human Services Department and its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Both HHS and CDC made the still unlicensed vaccine available to potentially exposed postal
workers and congressional staffers not as an immunization, but as a treatment supplemental
to antibiotics - without a scintilla of scientific evidence that such inoculations could
help prevent the disease in exposed individuals. Even the HHS and CDC officials
responsible refused to recommend the workers actually take the shots. In the fields of
advertising, public relations, and political speech writing, this approach is sometimes
called the "The Spaghetti Theorem" - throw an untried idea against the wall and
see if it sticks. It has no place in science or medicine.
And now we learn from the CDC-authored informed consent documents for such civilian shots
that the anthrax vaccine may be connected to birth defects if the inoculation is given
during pregnancy. The data come from a preliminary Navy study still under review. So far
the Pentagon has refused to provide further details.
Further, we now have learned from the October 23, 2001, GAO
report "Anthrax Vaccine: Changes to the Manufacturing Process" that the FDA
has blatantly turned a blind eye in its oversight and surveillance of the Bioport anthrax
production facility.
A less recognized yet more flagrant medical ethics violation by HHS is its endorsement and
defense of the so-called "Durban
Declaration." Ironically, the Durban Declaration memorialized 20 years of
frustration and failure by the AIDS research community to successfully treat the disease
by eliminating the associated virus, HIV, with either drugs or vaccines. The Declaration
claims to be based on an exhaustive medical literature. But this literature is
substantially comprised of opinions, poorly conducted studies, and reviews of poorly
conducted studies. Instead of using the milestone of 20 years as a "call to
arms" to encourage novel and non-traditional research approaches, 93 HHS employees
from agencies including the NIH, FDA and CDC, published a declaration in the journal
Nature stating that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS and that the scientific debate is
closed. As a scientist, I was outraged to see such a declaration which seems totally at
odds with the tradition of the scientific method.
Here is what lies ahead for people who suffer from emerging chronic diseases like GWS and
AIDS as well as for efforts to protect the population at large from mad cow disease and
chemical and biological terrorism. Rather than recognizing and reporting on the failures
to cure, prevent, or successfully treat a disease, HHS scientists will continue to deny
that billions of taxpayer dollars and decades of medical research has yielded little or no
progress in the understanding of chronic syndromes. Yet, they will publish documents that
will mandate how future medical research should and should not be conducted. Scientific
journals will publish these documents and imply that they are scientific in nature.
Mainstream media, without asking any hard questions, will then distribute the information
to the general population and label all who challenge the documents as
"dissidents."
Label us what you want, but misrepresentations are misrepresentations. We continue to use
the Internet to describe our scientific position. You can view our correspondence with the
HHS on our website, www.chronicillnet.org
(Government Relations). It asks how HHS scientists can take the position that a virus is
the sole cause of AIDS based on opinions, poorly conducted studies and reviews of poorly
conducted studies.
By allowing its 93 employees, all of whom are ostensibly public servants, to abuse their
powerful government positions by signing the Durban Declaration, HHS has signaled the
American people that it will permit its scientists to take a public position on unsolved
medical problems instead of finding the answers through rigorous research. Research into
GWS is directly affected by these unethical practices. How?
Genomes
and germs.
Exemplified by the Durban Declaration, the American medical science complex is unwilling
to accept and, in fact, vigorously opposed to the idea that epidemics and disease clusters
can happen without a single microbe as the prime causative agent. The original successes
of Pasteur and Koch in the late 1800's with a select number of bacterial maladies do not
hold true for all diseases, especially the chronic diseases. This "one
size fits all" single-germ approach of medical science is why diseases like GWS,
childhood paralysis, and AIDS have not been conquered. By allowing HHS to mandate how
science will be conducted, a clear government sanction has been established. This sanction
will prevent the discovery and innovative research needed to attack the tough medical
issues we face today.
Allow me to give you an example of why the "one size fits all" approach does not
work for chronic illnesses. For 100 years, since Landsteiner and Popper transmitted
poliomyelitis from a boy to a laboratory animal, every doctor in the world will tell you
that the childhood paralysis was caused by a single entity called the poliovirus and can
be completely stopped by polio vaccine. The chronicillnet.org web site has posted a
detailed special report questioning why the polio vaccine has not eliminated childhood
paralysis world-wide and even challenging medical researchers to produce the hard
science to show if there was ever was a poliovirus epidemic. Diseases cannot be conquered
if scientists refuse to admit they are wrong, go back into the laboratory, and work until
they find the truth.
This astonishing abuse of the scientific method by political scientists has led us to the
stalemate we are in today. Clearly, science has been trapped in similar stalemates before.
In the 1600's, Galileo, equipped with a new invention, the telescope, was able to confirm
Copernicus' heliocentric theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the
reverse. The political system and religious institutions of the time made sure
Galileos ideas, teachings and writings were suppressed. Galileo was charged by the
Inquisition with heresy and sentenced to house arrest for life. It took hundreds of years
for scientific fact to overturn political opinion. We are facing the Galileo effect today
in medicine.
What are the implications of our current stalemate?
The world cannot defend itself against biological/chemical/radiation terrorism until this
stalemate is brought to an end. The single-germ-theory will not allow science to define
the genomic conditions necessary to render an individual susceptible to a disease process.
Terrorists will soon learn how to make their next move so that the weapons become more
effective. Our next move has to be the development of medications that can focus and
strengthen the genomic reaction to toxic injury. The current scientific stalemate prevents
us from making this type of progress. We cannot take this critical next move because the
stalemate has you believing that vaccines and conventional antibiotics are the way to stop
terrorism even though none of the data I have seen support this claim.
Scientific Revolution Tactics: Where Do We Go From Here?
I would like to go on record stating that the single-germ-theory as the cause of chronic
diseases will disappear once scientists learn the proper use of their new
"telescope," i.e. genomics.
I am sure you have heard about the power of genomics, but even in this brand-new
discipline we have a stalemate created by scientists trying to cram square pegs into round
holes. Most genomic scientists want you to believe that diseases occur as a result of
mutations in the genes that make proteins. Nature is telling you that many of the major
diseases are not in the protein coding genes but in what are misleadingly referred to as
the "junk" DNA. A quarter-century ago, I began my doctoral research in a lab
that studied how to create
poliomyelitis in mice without any poliovirus: by manipulating the junk DNA with toxic
chemicals or radiation. GWS has convinced me that these same interactions of toxic
exposures and chronic diseases occur in humans as well. So, the clues are now telling us
that the cause of chronic diseases is the JUNK genome, not the germs.
Who is listening to me?
I predicted in my last testimony to this Subcommittee that GWS research would lead to
medical breakthroughs in all areas of chronic disease research. I subsequently chose to
study a disease that would have commercial implications so as to raise investment capital
to prove my point. In less than 3 months' time and with only one other scientist, we are
now validating a new test for Mad Cow Disease that does not require the cow to be killed
before testing. Our test looks at the same genomic elements I found in GWS veterans. I am
confident that the validation of this test will prove the positive predictive value of
blood junk gene tests and have enormous value in protecting the food supply and human
health.
It is unfortunate, due to the stalemate, that this genomics test probably will never be
used in GWS research. The April 2001 GAO report on GWS has clearly outlined the obvious
study that should be done: use a variation of the genomics test on the Persian Gulf War
vets, deployed and non-deployed, from the US, UK and France. If the French soldiers truly
have a lower incidence of GWS, the genomics test will confirm it. The follow-up studies
can then refine the testing procedures so that treatment options can be judged against a
soon to be validated laboratory marker.
How do we break out of this stalemate? Let me share some of my thoughts.
First, if science and government wish to continue any kind of responsible partnership, a
new paradigm must be developed. It must allow scientific and public discourse on fresh
research ideas, even if they contradict long-held doctrines. .
Second, the federal structure must end the de facto government sanctions that exist as a
result of an inherent bias toward "maverick" research -- defined as any study
that contradicts the conventional wisdom that germs cause all infectious diseases and
ignores an avalanche of findings about the human genome. It's the genes, not the germs.
Third, we must leave behind a dim decade of "denying clues" that has not only
deprived Gulf War veterans a possible pathway out of illness, but even worse has
established a template of refusal to consider almost any new ideas on any medical subject.
We must not continue to allow stale dogma to trash true science.
I am certain we will overcome this stalemate. Scientific discovery and new treatment
modalities will prevail. Results-minded researchers will go to the private sector, as the
global marketplace is proving.
The role of Congress should be to do what it does best -- keep the pressure on. As you are
all-too-aware, we are engaged in a long-term war that involves hideous brands of
terrorism, invasions of our homeland for the first time in 187 years, and a life-and-death
necessity to realize: We don't have years to change the way we protect our troops and our
people against chemical and biological warfare -- at best, we have months. You will never
be able to protect the citizens of this country if HHS is not held accountable for its
actions that continue to discourage scientific discovery in the ways I have described.
In conclusion, I want to thank this Subcommittee for its leadership in trying to
understand the complexities surrounding the treatment of GWS. I also want to thank the
staff of the GAO for its first class reports on GWS related issues as well as calling them
as they see them.
I again thank the Subcommittee for recognizing the contributions I have made to the GWS
medical literature and for my modest attempt at trying to keep the scientific debates
open.
I ask that the full text of my statement be submitted for inclusion in the record of the
hearing.
[Home]