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NEW YORK (Reuter) - The head of a Pentagon panel that dismissed links between biological weapons and the illness of Gulf War veterans was also a director of an institute that had exported anthrax to Iraq, Newsday reported Wednesday.
The newspaper said federal records showed Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg was one of 10 directors on the board of American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) when he chaired the commission.
According to congressional records, the nonprofit Rockville, Maryland, company made 70 government-approved shipments of anthrax and other disease-causing pathogens to Iraqi scientists between 1985 and 1989, Newsday reported.
The Defense Department said Lederberg had told it he was on the board of the non-profit institute but did not know about the alleged shipments to Iraq until he saw news reports about them in June 1994.
"Dr. Lederberg was selected for his skill and expertise," it said. "We have confidence in the work of the Defense Science Board under his chair."
Lederberg became a director on the board, an unpaid position, in 1990, the year after the Bush administration halted the shipments. He resigned from ATCC last year.
Anthrax is dispersed as an aerosol and anthrax spores can produce high fever, breathing difficulty, chest pain and eventually blood poisoning and death. Newsday said that according to the U.S. Army, anthrax spores can remain lethal to humans for decades.
President Clinton ordered the study by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Persian Gulf War Health Effects in 1993 after a number of soldiers who served in the 1991 war complained of fatigue, sore joints, sleep problems, diarrhoea, memory loss and other health problems.
Lederberg, who shared the Nobel for medicine in 1958, wrote in his 1994 report after the seven-month study that "there is no scientific and medical evidence that either chemical or biological warfare was deployed at any level against us, or that there were any exposures of U.S. services members to chemical or biological warfare agents in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia."
The United States and its western and Arab allies fought a brief war against Iraq in early 1991 following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. President Saddam Hussein remained in power in Baghdad.
Newsday quoted an unidentified U.S. official as saying that ATCC's products, designed for research, were not the only source for Iraqi scientists whom Washington believes worked to expand Baghdad's biological weapons program.
A United Nations commission found no evidence however, that Iraq used biological weapons or succeeded in developing the pathogens into usable battlefield munitions.
Attorneys for veterans have argued that some biological agents may have been included in nerve gas and other poisonous chemicals on the battlefield.