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[Guest guest]

While the world was watching cruise missiles descend on Iraq like giant

blurry sparklers in the night sky, Blackhawk helicopter pilot Sharon

Nicolson was ferrying special forces and Navy SEALS. It was February

1991, Operation Desert Storm.

Her chopper flew near Patriot missiles that were obliterating Iraqi

Scuds and was involved in several air raids. While Nicolson was

airborne, the wind whipped up sandstorms so severe that she rarely ever

saw anything clearly, including the ground. But something else that

Nicholson couldn't see would soon turn one of the shortest wars in

history into the longest nightmare of her life.

More than 5 million American civilians with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,

Fibromyalgia Syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and several other chronic,

long-lasting diseases experience symptoms similar to Gulf War Illness.

That April, after the war ended, Nicolson returned to Fort ,

Kentucky, to continue Army pilot training. But she slowly began to

experience disturbing symptoms. She found herself sweating in her sleep,

and her joints ached. Dragging herself out of bed each morning, she

sometimes couldn't see straight. One by one, she failed every one of the

Army's routine physical strength tests, and eventually she dropped out

of flight training.

Enter Garth Nicolson, chairman of tumor biology at the University of

Texas M.D. Cancer Center in Houston-and also Sharon's

stepfather. With Sharon's doctors offering nothing more than a

prescription for rest and relaxation, Nicolson began experimenting on

his own to find a cure. He searched the medical literature for similar

illnesses and scrutinized their treatments. Some of Sharon's symptoms

resembled those caused by certain bacterial infections. So Nicolson

tried a series of antibiotics until he found one that seemed to work,

a drug called doxycycline. After taking it for almost a year, Sharon

finally recovered.

Larger than viruses yet smaller than bacteria, mycoplasmas are the

smallest self-replicating life form. They have been implicated in many

diseases, but a clear link has been difficult to prove. Often,

mycoplasmas latch onto white blood cells, which are part of the body's

disease defenses, with a hook-like tip; then they transmit chemical

signals that force blood cells to behave abnormally. Mycoplasmas

can burrow deep inside cells, making them difficult to detect.

But that wasn't the end of the mystery malady. Other vets from Sharon's

division, and even their family members, were falling ill and turning to

Nicolson for advice. " Even without a diagnosis, we saw that the

antibiotics were helping people recover. We decided right then that we

were going to have to prove this [had a biological cause], " says

Nicolson, a feisty middle-aged man with a mop of dense silver hair and

mottled eyebrows as thick as hedges. He'd ruled out the placebo effect

because certain antibiotics like penicillin didn't work. And since

family members were also falling ill, he assumed it was something

that was being transmitted.

Nicolson didn't realize it at the time, but his quest to find what ailed

his stepdaughter would consume him for the next four years. He began by

compiling a list of possible culprits based on organisms that were known

to cause similar symptoms. These included brucella, coxiella, anthrax,

and a group of poorly characterized microorganisms called

mycoplasmas-amorphous microscopic organisms larger than viruses and

related to bacteria-which he had only learned about in 1991 after

reading a newspaper article about symptoms they cause in AIDS

patients.

continued at:

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