A recent controversy in the media surrounded the complaints of serious physical symptoms in veterans returning from the 1991 Gulf War. Allegations that the physical symptoms were due to exposure to chemical or biological agents could not be fully substantiated and the research results remain incomplete.
Although stress is being better understood as a real, dangerous causative factor in inducing illness (or at least a factor that increases vulnerability to illness), the explanation that Gulf War Syndrome is a stress induced illness often brings a reaction of outrage from some of the disputants in this controversy, as if it were being implied that the syndrome is less real because it may be stress related.