The Department of Veterans Affairs was accused before Congress this week of numerous accounts of negligence, including hiding or obscuring research data involving Gulf War veterans and failing to treat former soldiers outright.

For example, roughly 2,000 military participants in a recent survey said they had felt in the previous two weeks that they’d be better off dead. Only a small percentage of them received follow-up calls from a mental health clinician, testified Steven Coughlin, Ph.D., MPH, adjunct professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta.

In addition, Coughlin said he co-authored a paper from the same survey on the relationship between inhalational exposure during the war and asthma and bronchitis, but a superior at the VA told him to disregard data Coughlin deemed essential to understanding the link.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.