EDITOR’S CHOICE

best seller Baby & Child Care, continued to recommend sleeping on the front up to 1988. Surprisingly, published data on the Gulf War syndrome has only examined the experience of US, British, and other troops foreign to the Gulf region. In this issue we provide the first attempt to examine the health problems of coalition forces from the Gulf region. Remarkably low hospitalization rates were found, with a small increase in those exposed to combat.11 Our commentators review the evidence on the Gulf War syndrome, another piece of which we have published here,12 to demonstrate how little secure knowledge has been achieved despite considerable research expenditure.13,14 But if war does not seem to have much impact on subsequent hospitalizations, it may have effects on the ratio of male to female live births. Serious stressors, such as war or rapid economic decline, ar