NO INCREASE FOUND IN PERSIAN GULF WAR VETERANS' DEATH RATE.

Byline: Gina Kolata The New York Times

Two large federal studies of Persian Gulf War veterans have found that their death rates from disease and their hospitalization rates are no different from those of veterans of the same era who did not serve in the war.

The studies, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, involve essentially every veteran who served in the gulf, more than half a million people, and an equal number of veterans who did not serve there.

Members of the special White House panel investigating complaints of illness among Gulf War veterans said Wednesday that they had known for some time about the findings, which were reflected in a draft report prepared several weeks ago. The report is expected to say it is unlikely that veterans became ill through exposure to chemical weapons, although the possibility that clusters of veterans were affected cannot yet be ruled out.

The findings are reassuring, some medical experts said, in light of the widespread fear among Gulf War veterans that service in the gulf has sickened thousands. But many veterans remain unconvinced.

Ever since the war - and even during it - veterans have been complaining that they were ill. Within a year after the war, the Department of Veterans Affairs began a registry of veterans who were concerned about their health, as did the Defense Department.

Now, about 80,000 veterans are listed in these registries. But after insisting for years that no troops were exposed to chemical agents in the gulf, the Pentagon now says as many as 20,000 troops may have been exposed.

The complaints reported by the veterans are poorly understood and include illnesses like asthma and heart disease as well as symptoms like fatigue and muscular pain.

Five independent panels have been unable to find a unique pattern of diseases or symptoms among Gulf War veterans.

The mortality study, by Dr. Han K. Kang and Tim A. Bullman, who are epidemiologists at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, included all 695,516 military personnel who served in the gulf as well as 746,291 other veterans. The investigators searched for death records and found that the Gulf War veterans had a slightly higher death rate but that the increase was entirely due to accidents, like auto wrecks.

The second study, of hospitalizations, was conducted by Dr. Gregory C. Gray, a medical epidemiologist at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, and his colleagues. They scrutinized the hospitalization records of the 547,076 gulf veterans who were on active duty, and compared them with the records of 618,335 other veterans.

``If you use hospitalizations as a surrogate for serious illness, the good news for Gulf War veterans is that there is no difference,'' between them and other veterans Gray said in a telephone interview. He explained that he only looked at hospitalizations in military hospitals and looked only at those in the 25 months after the war ended.