The scope of the crisis proves far worse than what mainstream media has reported. Riley cites approximately 15,000 Gulf War veteran deaths, a 67 percent birth defect rate among children of affected veterans, and evidence that the illness is communicable through perspiration, saliva, and blood. She describes veterans denied treatment, given psychiatric diagnoses instead of antibiotics, and forced to buy veterinary tetracycline from feed stores because VA hospitals refuse to prescribe the five-dollar-per-week doxycycline shown to help.
Art Bell draws repeated parallels to HIV as Riley explains that 40 percent of the AIDS envelope gene was reportedly engineered into the mycoplasma causing the illness. The episode stands as an urgent alarm about a spreading public health catastrophe being actively suppressed by the institutions responsible for creating it.
Key Moments
Riley's own illness: flight nurse at Kelly AFB, demyelination in seven spots: Riley describes serving from January to July 1991 as a flight nurse with the 32nd Air Evacuation Squadron at Kelly Air Force Base, then deteriorating through that year with paresthesia, severe muscle pain, and MRI findings of demyelination in seven spots in her brain and spinal cord, similar to multiple sclerosis.
Soviet doctrine: biologicals and chemicals mixed in Iraqi Scuds: Riley alleges that 18 to 20 biological agents were shipped to Saddam Hussein from 1983 through 1989 and were used in a Soviet doctrine that mixed multiple chemicals and biologicals in Scud warheads, which detonated at roughly 200 feet when intercepted by Patriot missiles.
Named suppliers: Sigma Aldrich and American Type Culture Collection: Riley names two specific suppliers: Sigma Aldrich Corporation of St. Louis, fined $400,000 in July 1996 for selling biologicals to third world countries without a license, and the American Type Culture Collection of Rockville, Maryland, which she says shipped pathogens to Saddam Hussein with U.S. government and CDC awareness.
Pathogens sold: anthrax, botulinum, staph, strep, E. coli: Riley enumerates specific class three pathogens she says U.S. suppliers sold to Iraq: anthrax, Clostridium botulinum, staphylococcus, streptococcus, and E. coli.