The power to tax is the power to destroy.

If true, this is fascinating research with huge implications.

Their research, involving healthy veterans and veterans with severe and chronic fatigue, as well as non-veterans with chronic fatigue syndrome, showed that affected veterans, in comparison with healthy controls, had an increased frequency of a nonbeneficial genetic variant in a gene involved in the production of angiotension-converting-enzyme (ACE), an enzyme important in the control of blood pressure and electrolyte balance.
Unexpectedly, the nonbeneficial variant was less common among non-veterans with symptoms identical to those of Gulf War Syndrome, indicating that the genetic variant rendered the carriers more susceptible to triggers present in the Gulf-War environment.
Results were reported in the July issue of Muscle and Nerve.

The PI is Georgirene Vladutiu, Ph.D., UB professor of pediatrics, neurology and pathology. She also directs the Robert Guthrie Biochemical Genetics Laboratory at the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo and specializes in the laboratory diagnosis of metabolic muscle diseases.
A couple of comments from her:

"Soldiers serving now are exposed to different environmental triggers. In addition, our sample is small. We need to prove or disprove these findings in a larger group of veterans from different theaters of war."

"If the results show a specific association only in veterans of the first Gulf War, then there was likely an environmental factor, such as one or more chemical exposures that, combined with variations in the ACE gene, predisposed certain individuals to the development of medically unexplained chronic fatigue."