Is there a link between Mast Cell Disease and Gulf War Illness?
Dr. Bernstein: Well actually, as a matter of fact, our laboratory has some experience with that and we came about this through a serendipitous manner. Actually, we have been doing a lot of work on seminal plasma hypersensitivities, anaphylaxis that occurs after sexual intercourse, and weve isolated some of the actual proteins that cause this. And, weve kept up this research different varieties of this but one of things that the War Department, or the Defense Department, I guess it is the War Department these days (laughs), but one of the things that the Defense Department wanted to establish was whether or not certain veterans coming back from the Gulf War complained of unusual burning sensation, urethral burning sensation, and their wives complained of unusual burning sensation after intercourse. And this was a considerable number of veterans. There was a cluster of them. So we were awarded some money to study this and we in fact found that there was a higher percentage of these veter
