title: Butte, Montana

text: Politically, Butte has historically been a Democratic stronghold, owing to its union legacy. Likewise, Silver Bow County has historically been one of the strongest Democratic bastions in Montana. In 1996, Haley Beaudry became the first Republican to represent Butte in the state legislature since 1950. In 2010, Max Yates was the next Butte Republican elected to the legislature; however, neither Beaudry or Yates were re-elected. In 2014, Butte became the third city in Montana to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting LGBT residents and visitors from discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Butte is home to numerous museums and other educational institutions chronicling the city's history. In 2002, Butte was one of only twelve towns in America to be named a Distinctive Destination by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Butte Silver Bow Public Library, located at 226 W. Broadway in uptown Butte (BSB Library has two branches, one in the mall (South Branch), and is dedicated to preserving the town's history. The Butte library was created in 1894 as "an antidote to the miners' proclivity for drinking, whoring, and gambling," designed to promote middle-class values and to promote an image of Butte as a cultivated city. Additionally, the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives stores and provides public access to documents and artifacts from Butte's past.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Several museums and attractions are dedicated to the city's mining history, including the MBMG Mineral Museum (located on the Montana Tech campus), and the World Museum of Mining located at the Orphan Girl mine in uptown Butte, which features "Hell Roarin' Gulch," a mockup of a frontier mining town. The Berkeley Pit, a gigantic former open pit copper mine, is also open to the public for viewing. Other museums are dedicated to preserving cultural elements of Butte: The Dumas Brothel museum, a former brothel, is located in Venus Alley, Butte's former historical red-light district. Another notable site is the Rookwood Speakeasy, a prohibition-era speakeasy which features an underground city, and the Mai Wah Museum, dedicated to preserving Asian heritage in the Rocky Mountains.


title: Butte, Montana

text: The 34-room Copper King Mansion in uptown Butte was constructed in 1884 by William A. Clark, one of the city's three Copper Kings. The mansion functions as a bed-and-breakfast and local museum, and is often reported to be a haunted site. The Art Chateau, at one time home to Clark's son, Charles, was designed in the image of a French château, and contemporarily houses the Butte-Silver Bow Arts Foundation.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Located above Butte on the northeast edge of the city is the Our Lady of the Rockies statue, a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, dedicated to women and mothers everywhere, situated on top of the Continental Divide. The statue was air-liftedto the site on December 17, 1985, after six years of construction. Butte is also home to the U.S. High Altitude Speed Skating Center, an outdoor speed-skating rink used as a training location for World Cup skaters.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Throughout uptown and western Butte are over ten underground mine headframes that are remnants from the town's mining industry. These include the Anselmo, the Steward, the Original, the Travona, the Belmont, the Kelly, the Mountain Con, the Lexington, the Bell/Diamond, the Granite Mountain, and the Badger. As part of a community project started around 2004, several headframes were repainted and outlined with LED lights which are illuminated at night.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Butte's longstanding Irish Catholic community (which is the highest per capita of any city in the United States) has been celebrated annually on St. Patrick's Day since 1882. Each year, about 30,000 revelers converge on Butte's historic Uptown district to enjoy the parade led by the Ancient Order of Hibernians.


title: Butte, Montana

text: A larger annual celebration is Evel Knievel Days, held on the last weekend of July, celebrating Evel Knievel (a Butte native). The weekend-long event, held in Uptown Butte, features various stunt performances, sporting competitions, fundraisers, and live music.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Butte is perhaps becoming most renowned for the regional Montana Folk Festival held on the second weekend in July. This event began its run in Butte as the National Folk Festival from 2008 to 2010 and in 2011 made the transition to a free-of-admission music festival. Also held in the summer is Butte's Fourth of July Parade and Fireworks show. In 2008, Barack Obama spent his last Fourth of July before his Presidency campaigning in Butte, taking in the parade with his family, and celebrating his daughter Malia Obama's 10th birthday.


title: Butte, Montana

text: The legacy of the immigrants in Butte lives on in the form of various local cuisine, including the Cornish pasty which was popularized by mine workers who needed something easy to eat in the mines, the povitica—a Slavic nut bread pastry which is a holiday favorite sold in many supermarkets and bakeries in Butte—and the boneless porkchop sandwich. The Pekin Noodle Parlor in Uptown is the oldest family-owned, continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the US.


title: Butte, Montana

text: After the closure of the Berkeley Pit mining operations in 1982, pipes which pumped groundwater out of the pit were turned off, resulting in the pit slowly filling with groundwater, creating an artificial lake. Only two years later the pit was classified as a Superfund site and an environmental hazard site. The water in the pit is contaminated with various hard metals, such as arsenic, cadmium, and zinc.


title: Butte, Montana

text: It was not until the 1990s that serious efforts to clean up the Berkeley Pit began. The situation gained even more attention after as many as 342 migrating geese chose the pit lake as a resting place, resulting in their deaths. Steps have since been taken to prevent a recurrence, including but not limited to loudspeakers broadcasting sounds to scare off waterfowl. However, in November 2003 the Horseshoe Bend treatment facility went online and began treating and diverting much of the water that would have flowed into the pit. The Berkeley Pit is both a Superfund site and tourist attraction, viewable from an observation deck. Per a 2014 report, scientists believe the Berkeley Pit may reach the critical water level—potentially contaminating Silver Bow Creek—by the year 2023. Beginning in 2019, the Montana Resources and Atlantic Richfield Co. are ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency to begin treating water from the pit, which is to then be discharged into Silver Bow Creek at a rate of per day. Nikia Greene, EPA project manager for mine flooding, assured in 2014: "The pit is a giant bathtub. There's a hydraulic gradient into the pit. We will never let the water reach the critical level."


title: Butte, Montana

text: The Upper Clark Fork River, with Butte at the headwaters, is America's largest Superfund site, spanning . This area takes in the cities of Butte, Anaconda, and Missoula. The mining and smelting activity in Butte resulted in significant contamination of the Butte Hill as well as downstream and downwind areas. The contaminated land extends along a corridor of that reaches to Milltown near Missoula and takes in adjacent areas such as the Anaconda smelter site. Contaminated sediment flooded out from abandoned mines was the root cause of the pollution at the headwaters of the Clark Fork River.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Between the upstream city of Butte and the downstream city of Missoula lies the Deer Lodge Valley. By the 1970s, local citizens and agency personnel were increasingly concerned over the toxic effects of arsenic and heavy metals on environment and human health. The Anaconda Copper Mining Corporation (ACM), which merged with the Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO) in 1977, is considered one of the responsible parties in this contamination. Shortly thereafter, in 1983, ARCO ceased mining and smelting operations in the Butte-Anaconda area.


title: Butte, Montana

text: For more than a century, the Anaconda Copper Mining company mined ore from Butte and smelted it in Butte (prior to 1920) and in nearby Anaconda. During this time, the Anaconda smelter released up to per day of arsenic, per day of sulfur, and great quantities of lead and other heavy metals into the air. In Butte, mine tailings were dumped directly into Silver Bow Creek, creating a plume of pollution extending down the valley to Milltown Dam on the Clark Fork River just upstream of Missoula. Air and water borne pollution poisoned livestock and agricultural soils throughout the Deer Lodge Valley. Modern environmental clean-up efforts have continued into the twenty-first century.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Playing for the Pioneer Baseball League, the Butte Copper Kings were first active from 1979–1985, then 1987–2000; as of 2018, the team is known as the Grand Junction Rockies.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Hockey teams from Butte have included the Butte Irish (America West Hockey League) active from 1996 to 2002, after which they became the Wichita Falls Wildcats; and the Butte Roughriders (Northern Pacific Hockey League), active from 2003 to 2011. The Butte Cobras, a Western States Hockey League team, was active from 2014 to 2017. The Cobras then bought the Glacier Nationals franchise in the North American 3 Hockey League (NA3HL) for the 2017–18 season, but the team went dormant prior to playing the season. They eventually began playing in the NA3HL for the 2018–19 season.


title: Butte, Montana

text: The Butte Daredevils (Continental Basketball Association), active from 2006 to 2008, were named for Butte native Evel Knievel.


title: Butte, Montana

text: University teams include the Montana Tech Orediggers, who have competed in the Frontier Conference of the NAIA since the league's founding in 1952. The school hosts men's and women's basketball, football, golf, and women's volleyball.


title: Butte, Montana

text: The city is served by the Butte Bus system, which operates within Butte as well as to the Montana Tech campus and nearby Walkerville. Intercity bus service is provided by Jefferson Lines and Salt Lake Express. Bert Mooney Airport has commercial flights on Delta Connection Airlines and Horizon Air.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Butte can be accessed via Interstate 15 from north–south, and Interstate 90 from east–west; the two intersect in Butte, making Butte and Billings the only cities in Montana situated at a juncture of two interstate highways. The city can also be accessed from the south via Montana Highway 2 (Old U.S. Route 10).


title: Butte, Montana

text: The Union Pacific Railroad until 1971 ran the "Butte Special" from Butte, south to Idaho Falls, then to Salt Lake City. Until 1979 Butte was served by Amtrak's Chicago – Seattle "North Coast Hiawatha" train.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Public education is provided by Butte Public Schools. Butte High School enrolls around 1,300 students. In correspondence with the Butte Public Schools system, the Butte Education Foundation was established in 2006, which aims to revitalize the public schools in an effort to attract new businesses and residents. In the foundation's mission statement, it is noted that there is a "need to demonstrate a genuine and ongoing commitment to public education. Schools are often the first thing visitors ask about when looking at Butte as a potential new home."


title: Butte, Montana

text: There are several private schools in Butte: The Butte Central Catholic High School operates under the Diocese of Helena, which also operates Butte Central Elementary, a Catholic elementary school. Other private elementary schools include the Silver Bow Montessori School.


title: Butte, Montana

text: The first institute of higher education in Butte was the Montana School of Mines, which was established in 1889, the year of Montana's statehood. The university changed its name to Montana Tech in the mid-twentieth century, and in 1994 became affiliated with the University of Montana. The university specializes in engineering as well as geologic and hydrogeologic research. It was ranked no. 4 by the U.S. News & World Report in 2017 for "Best Regional Colleges in the West." Montana Tech of the University of Montana officially changed its name to Montana Technological University in 2018. Montana Technological University is also home to Highlands College, a two-year-college that grants associate's and trade degrees.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Major AM stations in Butte are KBOW AM 550 (country), KANA 580 (oldies), and KXTL 1370 (oldies and talk radio). FM stations include KAPC 91.3 Montana Public Radio (via the University of Montana); KAAR 92.5 (country); KOPR 94.1 (classic rock), KMBR 95.5 (mainstream rock), KQRV 96.9 (country), KGLM 97.7 (contemporary), KMSM 103.9 (variety), and KBMF 102.5 community radio (classical; via Montana State University).


title: Butte, Montana

text: Butte shares its Neilsen market with nearby Bozeman, with which it forms the 194th largest TV market in the United States. Local television stations include: KXLF (Channel 4), a CBS/CW affiliate, and the oldest broadcast television station in the state of Montana; KTVM (Channel 6), an NBC affiliate with additional programming from nearby KECI-TV in Missoula; KUSM (Channel 9), a PBS affiliate broadcasting out of Montana State University in Bozeman; and KWYB (Channel 19), an ABC/FOX affiliate and last of the "Big Three" networks to come into the market (1992). Prior to this Butte's ABC feeds came from KUSA-TV in Denver, Colorado and FOX from now-defunct Butte station KBTZ.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Butte has one local daily, a weekly paper, as well as several papers from around the state of Montana. "The Montana Standard" is Butte's daily paper. It was founded in 1928 and is the result of "The Butte Miner" and the "Anaconda Standard" merging into one daily paper. The "Standard" is owned by Lee Enterprises. "The Butte Weekly" is another local paper.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Butte has appeared in numerous films. The first film to notably feature Butte was "Evel Knievel" (1971), a biopic of Evel Knievel, a Butte native. The 1976 thriller "The Killer Inside Me", starring Stacy Keach and Susan Tyrrell and set in small-town Montana, was also partially shot in Butte in September 1974. The city was featured in "Runaway Train" (1985), shot in part on the Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, and the miniseries "Return to Lonesome Dove" (1993). Other films shot in Butte include "F.T.W." (1994).


title: Butte, Montana

text: The animated film "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" (1996) depicts Butte. In 2004, the Wim Wenders film "Don't Come Knocking" was set and shot in Butte. In 2015, the SyFy-produced horror film "Dead 7", which starred Nick Carter and AJ McLean of the Backstreet Boys, as well as Joey Fatone of 'NSync, was shot at the city's Anselmo Mine yards. The 2019 film "Juanita" is set in Butte.


title: Butte, Montana

text: The city has been subject of several documentary films, including "Die Vergessene Stadt: Butte, Montana" (1992), a German documentary by Thomas Schadt, and "Butte, America" (2008), narrated by Gabriel Byrne.


title: Butte, Montana

text: One of the earliest literary depictions of Butte was by Mary MacLane, a diarist who wrote of her life growing up in the town at the turn of the twentieth century. Her diaries are published under the title "I Await the Devil's Coming", and have been credited as a progenitor of confessional writing. Butte answers to the unflattering description of the fictional city of Poisonville in Dashiell Hammett's novel "Red Harvest", which also alludes to the 1920 Anaconda Road Massacre. The 1980 novel "The Butte Polka" by Donald McCaig also incorporates the city's mining history into its plot, featuring a character who goes missing from his post at a Butte copper mine.


title: Butte, Montana

text: More contemporary literary depictions of Butte can be found in 1998's "Buster Midnight's Cafe" by Sandra Dallas, as well as the historical fiction novel "Go By Go" by Jon A. Jackson, which depicts the 1917 Speculator Mine disaster. Ivan Doig's 2010 novel "Work Song" and his 2013 novel "Sweet Thunder" are set in Butte in 1919 and 1920 respectively, after World War I. "Confessions of a Shanty Irishman" by Michael Corrigan has a chapter-story set in Butte during the Speculator mining disaster and riots.


title: Butte, Montana

text: Novelist Marian Jensen also has published a mystery series named "Mining City Mysteries", which is set in Butte and the surrounding region.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city." Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. Medieval suburbs suffered from loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Modern disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The cost of building urban infrastructure for new developments is hardly ever recouped through property taxes, amounting to a subsidy for the developers and new residents at the expense of existing property taxpayers.


title: Urban sprawl

text: In Continental Europe, the term "peri-urbanisation" is often used to denote similar dynamics and phenomena, but the term "urban sprawl" is currently being used by the European Environment Agency. There is widespread disagreement about what constitutes sprawl and how to quantify it. For example, some commentators measure sprawl by residential density, using the average number of residential units per acre in a given area. Others associate it with decentralization (spread of population without a well-defined centre), discontinuity (leapfrogging development, as defined below), segregation of uses, and so forth.


title: Urban sprawl

text: The term "urban sprawl" is highly politicized and almost always has negative connotations. It is criticized for causing environmental degradation, intensifying segregation, and undermining the vitality of existing urban areas, and is attacked on aesthetic grounds. The pejorative meaning of the term means that few openly support urban sprawl as such. The term has become a rallying cry for managing urban growth.


title: Urban sprawl

text: The term "urban sprawl" was first used in an article in "The Times" in 1955 as a negative comment on the state of London's outskirts. Definitions of sprawl vary; researchers in the field acknowledge that the term lacks precision. Batty et al. defined sprawl as "uncoordinated growth: the expansion of community without concern for its consequences, in short, unplanned, incremental urban growth which is often regarded unsustainable." Bhatta et al. wrote in 2010 that despite a dispute over the precise definition of sprawl, there is a "general consensus that urban sprawl is characterized by [an] unplanned and uneven pattern of growth, driven by a multitude of processes and leading to inefficient resource utilization."


title: Urban sprawl

text: Reid Ewing has shown that sprawl has typically been characterized as urban developments exhibiting at least one of the following characteristics: low-density or single-use development, strip development, scattered development, and/or leapfrog development (areas of development interspersed with vacant land). He argued that a better way to identify sprawl was to use indicators rather than characteristics because this was a more flexible and less arbitrary method. He proposed using "accessibility" and "functional open space" as indicators. Ewing's approach has been criticized for assuming that sprawl is defined by negative characteristics.


title: Urban sprawl

text: What constitutes sprawl may be considered a matter of degree and will always be somewhat subjective under many definitions of the term. Ewing has also argued that suburban development does not, per se, constitute sprawl depending on the form it takes, although Gordon & Richardson have argued that the term is sometimes used synonymously with suburbanization in a pejorative way.


title: Urban sprawl

text: According to the National Resources Inventory (NRI), about of land in the United States was developed between 1982 and 2017. Presently, the NRI classifies approximately 100,000 more square kilometres (40,000 square miles) (an area approximately the size of Kentucky) as developed than the Census Bureau classifies as urban. The difference in the NRI classification is that it includes rural development, which by definition cannot be considered to be "urban" sprawl. Currently, according to the 2000 Census, approximately 2.6 percent of the U.S. land area is urban. Approximately 0.8 percent of the nation's land is in the 37 urbanized areas with more than 1,000,000 population. In 2002, these 37 urbanized areas supported around 40% of the total American population.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Nonetheless, some urban areas like Detroit have expanded geographically even while losing population. But it was not just urbanized areas in the U.S. that lost population and sprawled substantially. According to data in "Cities and Automobile Dependence" by Kenworthy and Laube (1999), urbanized area population losses occurred while there was an expansion of sprawl between 1970 and 1990 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Brussels, Belgium; Copenhagen, Denmark; Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich, Germany; and Zurich, Switzerland, albeit without the dismantling of infrastructure that occurred in the United States.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Metropolitan Los Angeles for example, despite popular notions of being a sprawling city, is the densest major urban area (over 1,000,000 population) in the US, being denser than the New York urban area and the San Francisco urban area. In the United States, for example, most of metropolitan Los Angeles is built at more uniform low to moderate density, leading to a much higher overall density for the entire region. This is in contrast to New York, San Francisco or Chicago which have compact, high-density cores surrounded by areas of very low-density suburban periphery, such as eastern Suffolk County in the New York metro area and Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Some cases of sprawl challenge the definition of the term and what conditions are necessary for urban growth to be considered sprawl. Metropolitan regions such as Greater Mexico City, Delhi National Capital Region and Beijing, are often regarded as sprawling despite being relatively dense and mixed use.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Many theories speculate as to the reason for the creation of urban sprawl. The theory of "flight from blight" explains that aspects of living in urban areas, such as high taxes, crime rates, poor infrastructure and school qualities lead to many people moving out of urban areas and into surrounding suburban cities. According to The Limits to Growth, reasons why wealthier people move to suburbs include noise, pollution, crime, drug addiction, poverty, labor strikes, and breakdown of social services.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Others suggest that Urban Sprawl is a natural product of population increases, higher wages, and therefore better access to housing. Improvement in transportation also means that individuals are able to live further from large cities and industrial hubs, thus increasing demand for better housing further from the noise of cities. This leads to the creation of sprawling residential land development surrounding densely packed urban cities.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Despite the lack of a clear agreed upon description of what defines sprawl most definitions often associate the following characteristics with sprawl.


title: Urban sprawl

text: This refers to a situation where commercial, residential, institutional and industrial areas are separated from one another. Consequently, large tracts of land are devoted to a single use and are segregated from one another by open space, infrastructure, or other barriers. As a result, the places where people live, work, shop, and recreate are far from one another, usually to the extent that walking, transit use and bicycling are impractical, so all these activities generally require a car. The degree to which different land uses are mixed together is often used as an indicator of sprawl in studies of the subject.


title: Urban sprawl

text: According to this criterion, China's urbanization can be classified as "high-density sprawl", a seemingly self-contradictory term coined by New Urbanist Peter Calthorpe. He explains that despite the high-rise buildings, China's superblocks (huge residential blocks) are largely single-use and surrounded by giant arterial roads, which detach different functions of a city and create an environment unfriendly to pedestrians.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Job sprawl is another land use symptom of urban sprawl and car-dependent communities. It is defined as low-density, geographically spread-out patterns of employment, where the majority of jobs in a given metropolitan area are located outside of the main city's central business district (CBD), and increasingly in the suburban periphery. It is often the result of urban disinvestment, the geographic freedom of employment location allowed by predominantly car-dependent commuting patterns of many American suburbs, and many companies' desire to locate in low-density areas that are often more affordable and offer potential for expansion. Spatial mismatch is related to job sprawl and economic environmental justice. Spatial mismatch is defined as the situation where poor urban, predominantly minority citizens are left without easy access to entry-level jobs, as a result of increasing job sprawl and limited transportation options to facilitate a reverse commute to the suburbs.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Job sprawl has been documented and measured in various ways. It has been shown to be a growing trend in America's metropolitan areas. The Brookings Institution has published multiple articles on the topic. In 2005, author Michael Stoll defined job sprawl simply as jobs located more than radius from the CBD, and measured the concept based on year 2000 U.S. Census data. Other ways of measuring the concept with more detailed rings around the CBD include a 2001 article by Edward Glaeser and Elizabeth Kneebone's 2009 article, which show that sprawling urban peripheries are gaining employment while areas closer to the CBD are losing jobs. These two authors used three geographic rings limited to a radius around the CBD: or less, 3 to , and 10 to . Kneebone's study showed the following nationwide breakdown for the largest metropolitan areas in 2006: 21.3% of jobs located in the inner ring, 33.6% of jobs in the 3–10 mile ring, and 45.1% in the 10–35 mile ring. This compares to the year 1998 – 23.3%, 34.2%, and 42.5% in those respective rings. The study shows CBD employment share shrinking, and job growth focused in the suburban and exurban outer metropolitan rings.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Sprawl often refers to low-density development. There is no precise definition of "low density," but it might commonly mean Single-family homes on large lots. Such buildings usually have fewer stories and are spaced farther apart, separated by lawns, landscaping, roads or parking lots. In the United States 2–4 houses per acre (5–10 per hectare) might be considered low-density while in the UK 8–12 per acre (or 20–30 per hectare) would still be considered low-density. Because more automobiles are used in the USA, much more land is designated for parking. The impact of low density development in many communities is that developed or "urbanized" land is increasing at a faster rate than the population is growing.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Overall density is often lowered by "leapfrog development". This term refers to the relationship, or lack of it, between subdivisions. Such developments are typically separated by large green belts, i.e. tracts of undeveloped land, resulting in an overall density far lower even than the low density indicated by localized per-acre measurements. This is a 20th and 21st century phenomenon generated by the current custom of requiring a developer to provide subdivision infrastructure as a condition of development. Usually, the developer is required to set aside a certain percentage of the developed land for public use, including roads, parks and schools. In the past, when a local government built all the streets in a given location, the town could expand without interruption and with a coherent circulation system, because it had condemnation power. Private developers generally do not have such power (although they can sometimes find local governments willing to help), and often choose to develop on the tracts that happen to be for sale at the time they want to build, rather than pay extra or wait for a more appropriate location.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Some research argues that religious ideas about how humans should live (and die) promote low-density development and may contribute to urban sprawl.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Land for sprawl is often taken from fertile agricultural lands, which are often located immediately surrounding cities; the extent of modern sprawl has consumed a large amount of the most productive agricultural land, as well as forest, desert and other wilderness areas. In the United States the seller may avoid tax on profit by using a tax break exempting like-kind exchanges from capital gains tax; proceeds from the sale are used to purchase agricultural land elsewhere and the transaction is treated as a "swap" or trade of like assets and no tax is due. Thus urban sprawl is subsidized by the tax code. In China, land has been converted from rural to urban use in advance of demand, leading to vacant rural land intended for future development, and eventual urban sprawl.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Housing subdivisions are large tracts of land consisting entirely of newly built residences. New Urbanist architectural firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company state that housing subdivisions "are sometimes called villages, towns, and neighbourhoods by their developers, which is misleading since those terms denote places that are not exclusively residential." They are also referred to as developments.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Subdivisions often incorporate curved roads and cul-de-sacs. These subdivisions may offer only a few places to enter and exit the development, causing traffic to use high volume collector streets. All trips, no matter how short, must enter the collector road in a suburban system.


title: Urban sprawl

text: After the Second World War, residential lawns became commonplace in suburbs, notably, but not exclusively in North America. The development of country clubs and golf courses in the early 20th century further promoted lawn culture in the United States. Lawns now take up a significant amount of land in suburban developments, contributing to sprawl.


title: Urban sprawl

text: In areas of sprawl, commercial use is generally segregated from other uses. In the U.S. and Canada, these often take the form of strip malls, which refer to collections of buildings sharing a common parking lot, usually built on a high-capacity roadway with commercial functions (i.e., a "strip"). Similar developments in the UK are called Retail Parks. Strip malls consisting mostly of big box stores or category killers are sometimes called "power centers" (U.S.). These developments tend to be low-density; the buildings are single-story and there is ample space for parking and access for delivery vehicles. This character is reflected in the spacious landscaping of the parking lots and walkways and clear signage of the retail establishments. Some strip malls are undergoing a transformation into Lifestyle centers; entailing investments in common areas and facilities (plazas, cafes) and shifting tenancy from daily goods to recreational shopping.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Another prominent form of retail development in areas characterized by sprawl is the shopping mall. Unlike the strip mall, this is usually composed of a single building surrounded by a parking lot that contains multiple shops, usually "anchored" by one or more department stores (Gruen and Smith 1960). The function and size is also distinct from the strip mall. The focus is almost exclusively on recreational shopping rather than daily goods. Shopping malls also tend to serve a wider (regional) public and require higher-order infrastructure such as highway access and can have floorspaces in excess of . Shopping malls are often detrimental to downtown shopping centres of nearby cities since the shopping malls act as a surrogate for the city centre (Crawford 1992). Some downtowns have responded to this challenge by building shopping centres of their own (Frieden and Sagelyn 1989).


title: Urban sprawl

text: Fast food chains are often built early in areas with low property values where the population is expected to boom and where large traffic is predicted, and set a precedent for future development. Eric Schlosser, in his book "Fast Food Nation", argues that fast food chains accelerate suburban sprawl and help set its tone with their expansive parking lots, flashy signs, and plastic architecture (65). Duany Plater Zyberk & Company believe that this reinforces a destructive pattern of growth in an endless quest to move away from the sprawl that only results in creating more of it.


title: Urban sprawl

text: One of the major environmental problems associated with sprawl is land loss, habitat loss and subsequent reduction in biodiversity. A review by Czech and colleagues finds that urbanization endangers more species and is more geographically ubiquitous in the mainland United States than any other human activity. Urban sprawl is disruptive to native flora & fauna and introduces invasive plants into their environments. Although the effects can be mitigated through careful maintenance of native vegetation, the process of ecological succession and public education, sprawl represents one of the primary threats to biodiversity.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Regions with high birth rates and immigration are therefore faced with environmental problems due to unplanned urban growth and emerging megacities such as Kolkata.


title: Urban sprawl

text: At the same time, the urban cores of these and nearly all other major cities in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan that did not annex new territory experienced the related phenomena of falling household size and, particularly in the U.S., "white flight", sustaining population losses. This trend has slowed somewhat in recent years, as more people have regained an interest in urban living.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Due to the larger area consumed by sprawling suburbs compared to urban neighborhoods, more farmland and wildlife habitats are displaced per resident. As forest cover is cleared and covered with impervious surfaces (concrete and asphalt) in the suburbs, rainfall is less effectively absorbed into the groundwater aquifers. This threatens both the quality and quantity of water supplies. Sprawl increases water pollution as rain water picks up gasoline, motor oil, heavy metals, and other pollutants in runoff from parking lots and roads.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Gordon & Richardson have argued that the conversion of agricultural land to urban use is not a problem due to the increasing efficiency of agricultural production; they argue that aggregate agricultural production is still more than sufficient to meet global food needs despite the expansion of urban land use.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Sprawl leads to increased driving, which in turn leads to vehicle emissions that contribute to air pollution and its attendant negative impacts on human health. In addition, the reduced physical activity implied by increased automobile use has negative health consequences. Sprawl significantly predicts chronic medical conditions and health-related quality of life, but not mental health disorders. The American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion, have both stated that there is a significant connection between sprawl, obesity, and hypertension.


title: Urban sprawl

text: In the years following World War II, when vehicle ownership was becoming widespread, public health officials recommended the health benefits of suburbs due to soot and industrial fumes in the city center. However, air in modern suburbs is not necessarily cleaner than air in urban neighborhoods. In fact, the most polluted air is on crowded highways, where people in suburbs tend to spend more time. On average, suburban residents generate more per capita pollution and carbon emissions than their urban counterparts because of their increased driving, as well as larger homes.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Sprawl also reduces the chance that people will take the bicycle for their commute which would be better for their health. Bicycles are a common mode of transportation for those living in urban centers due to many factors. One major factor many people consider relates to how, when one rides a bike to, say, their workplace, they are exercising as they do so. This multi-tasking is better for one's health than automatic transport.


title: Urban sprawl

text: A heavy reliance on automobiles increases traffic throughout the city as well as automobile crashes, pedestrian injuries, and air pollution.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of five and twenty-four and is the leading accident-related cause for all age groups. Residents of more sprawling areas are generally at greater risk of dying in a car crash due to increased exposure to driving. Evidence indicates that pedestrians in sprawling areas are at higher risk than those in denser areas, although the relationship is less clear than for drivers and passengers in vehicles.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Research covered in the "Journal of Economic Issues" and "State and Local Government Review" shows a link between sprawl and emergency medical services response and fire department response delays.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Living in larger, more spread out spaces generally makes public services more expensive. Since car usage becomes endemic and public transport often becomes significantly more expensive, city planners are forced to build highway and parking infrastructure, which in turn decreases taxable land and revenue, and decreases the desirability of the area adjacent to such structures. Providing services such as water, sewers, and electricity is also more expensive per household in less dense areas, given that sprawl increases lengths of power lines and pipes, necessitating higher maintenance costs .


title: Urban sprawl

text: Residents of low-density areas spend a higher proportion of their income on transportation than residents of high density areas. The unplanned nature of outward urban development is commonly linked to increased dependency on cars. In 2003, a British newspaper calculated that urban sprawl would cause an economic loss of 3905 pounds per year, per person through cars alone, based on data from the RAC estimating that the average cost of operating a car in the UK at that time was £5,000 a year, while train travel (assuming a citizen commutes every day of the year, with a ticket cost of 3 pounds) would be only £1095.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Urban sprawl may be partly responsible for the decline in social capital in the United States. Compact neighborhoods can foster casual social interactions among neighbors, while sprawl creates barriers. Sprawl tends to replace public spaces with private spaces such as fenced-in backyards.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Critics of sprawl maintain that sprawl erodes quality of life. Duany and Plater-Zyberk believe that in traditional neighborhoods the nearness of the workplace to retail and restaurant space that provides cafes and convenience stores with daytime customers is an essential component to the successful balance of urban life. Furthermore, they state that the closeness of the workplace to homes also gives people the option of walking or riding a bicycle to work or school and that without this kind of interaction between the different components of life the urban pattern quickly falls apart. James Howard Kunstler has argued that poor aesthetics in suburban environments make them "places not worth caring about", and that they lack a sense of history and identity.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Urban sprawl has class and racial implications in many parts of the world; the relative homogeneity of many sprawl developments may reinforce class and racial divides through residential segregation.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Numerous studies link increased population density with increased aggression. Some people believe that increased population density encourages crime and anti-social behavior. It is argued that human beings, while social animals, need significant amounts of social space or they become agitated and aggressive. However, the relationship between higher densities and increased social pathology has been largely discredited.


title: Urban sprawl

text: According to Nancy Chin, a large number of effects of sprawl have been discussed in the academic literature in some detail; however, the most contentious issues can be reduced "to an older set of arguments, between those advocating a planning approach and those advocating the efficiency of the market." Those who criticize sprawl tend to argue that sprawl creates more problems than it solves and should be more heavily regulated, while proponents argue that markets are producing the economically most efficient settlements possible in most situations, even if problems may exist. However, some market-oriented commentators believe that the current patterns of sprawl are in fact the result of distortions of the free market. Chin cautions that there is a lack of "reliable empirical evidence to support the arguments made either for or against sprawl." She mentions that the lack of a common definition, the need for more quantitative measures "a broader view both in time and space, and greater comparison with alternative urban forms" would be necessary to draw firmer conclusions and conduct more fruitful debates.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Arguments opposing urban sprawl include concrete effects such as health and environmental issues as well as abstract consequences including neighborhood vitality. American public policy analyst Randal O'Toole of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has argued that sprawl, thanks to the automobile, gave rise to affordable suburban neighborhoods for middle class and lower class individuals, including non-whites. He notes that efforts to combat sprawl often result in subsidizing development in wealthier and whiter neighborhoods while condemning and demolishing poorer minority neighborhoods.


title: Urban sprawl

text: The American Institute of Architects, American Planning Association, and Smart Growth America recommend against sprawl and instead endorses smart, mixed-use development, including buildings in close proximity to one another that cut down on automobile use, save energy, and promote walkable, healthy, well-designed neighborhoods. The Sierra Club, the San Francisco Bay Area's Greenbelt Alliance, 1000 Friends of Oregon and counterpart organizations nationwide, and other environmental organizations oppose sprawl and support investment in existing communities. NumbersUSA, a national organization advocating immigration reduction, also opposes urban sprawl, and its executive director, Roy Beck, specializes in the study of this issue.


title: Urban sprawl

text: One of the primary debates around suburban sprawl is the extent to which sprawl is the result of consumer preference. Some, such as Peter Gordon, a professor of planning and economics at the University of Southern California's School of Urban Planning and Development, argue that most households have shown a clear preference for low-density living and that this is a fact that should not be ignored by planners. Gordon and his frequent collaborator, Harry Richardson have argued that "The principle of consumer sovereignty has played a powerful role in the increase in America’s wealth and in the welfare of its citizens. Producers (including developers) have responded rapidly to households’ demands. It is a giant step backward to interfere with this effective process unless the benefits of intervention substantially exceed its cost." They argue that sprawl generates enough benefits for consumers that they continue to choose it as a form of development over alternative forms, as demonstrated by the continued focus on sprawl type developments by most developers. However, other academics such as Reid Ewing argue that while a large segment of people prefer suburban living that does not mean that sprawl itself is preferred by consumers, and that a large variety of suburban environments satisfy consumer demand, including areas that mitigate the worst effects of sprawl. Others, for example Kenneth T. Jackson have argued that since low-density housing is often (notably in the U.S.A.) subsidized in a variety of ways, consumers' professed preferences for this type of living may be over-stated.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Whether urban sprawl increases the problems of automobile dependency or not, policies of smart growth have been fiercely contested issues over several decades. An influential study in 1989 by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy compared 32 cities across North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. The study has been criticised for its methodology, but the main finding, that denser cities, particularly in Asia, have lower car use than sprawling cities, particularly in North America, has been largely accepted, although the relationship is clearer at the extremes across continents than it is within countries where conditions are more similar.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Within cities, studies from across many countries (mainly in the developed world) have shown that denser urban areas with greater mixture of land use and better public transport tend to have lower car use than less dense suburban and ex-urban residential areas. This usually holds true even after controlling for socio-economic factors such as differences in household composition and income. This does not necessarily imply that suburban sprawl causes high car use, however. One confounding factor, which has been the subject of many studies, is residential self-selection: people who prefer to drive tend to move towards low density suburbs, whereas people who prefer to walk, cycle or use transit tend to move towards higher density urban areas, better served by public transport. Some studies have found that, when self-selection is controlled for, the built environment has no significant effect on travel behavior. More recent studies using more sophisticated methodologies have generally refuted these findings: density, land use and public transport accessibility can influence travel behavior, although social and economic factors, particularly household income, usually exert a stronger influence.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Those not opposed to low density development argue that traffic intensities tend to be less, traffic speeds faster and, as a result, ambient air pollution is lower. (See demographia's report.) Kansas City, Missouri is often cited as an example of ideal low-density development, with congestion below the mean and home prices below comparable Midwestern cities. Wendell Cox and Randal O'Toole are leading figures supporting lower density development.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Longitudinal (time-lapse) studies of commute times in major metropolitan areas in the United States have shown that commute times decreased for the period 1969 to 1995 even though the geographic size of the city increased. Other studies suggest, however, that possible personal benefits from commute time savings have been at the expense of environmental costs in the form of longer average commute distances, rising vehicles-miles-traveled (VMT) per worker, and despite road expansions, worsening traffic congestion.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Critics of urban sprawl say that the United States' improper treatment of minority groups' access to transportation is a major downside to the continuation of urban sprawl. In many urban centers, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, transportation in minority areas is lacking. As found by Kate Baldridge of Golden Gate University Law, areas with high minority populations typically see less than adequate transportation options, leading to overcrowded and unsafe transportation routes that do not provide a comprehensive means of transportation. This disparity is made more evident because minority residents are more reliant on public transportation. According to Baldridge, this means that minority groups cannot move from urban areas, while people with higher incomes and thus better access to transportation can move out of urban areas and into surrounding suburbs.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Reviewing the evidence on urban intensification, smart growth and their effects on travel behaviour Melia et al. (2011) found support for the arguments of both supporters and opponents of smart growth measures to counteract urban sprawl. Planning policies that increase population densities in urban areas do tend to reduce car use, but the effect is a weak one, so doubling the population density of a particular area will not halve the frequency or distance of car use.


title: Urban sprawl

text: There is also some concern that anti-sprawl policies will increase housing prices. Some research suggests Oregon has had the largest housing affordability loss in the nation, but other research shows that Portland's price increases are comparable to other Western cities.


title: Urban sprawl

text: In Australia, it is claimed by some that housing affordability has hit "crisis levels" due to "urban consolidation" policies implemented by state governments. In Sydney, the ratio of the price of a house relative to income is 9:1. The issue has at times been debated between the major political parties.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Many critics concede that sprawl produces some negative externalities; however there is some dispute about the most effective way to reduce these negative effects. Gordon & Richardson for example argue that the costs of building new public transit is disproportionate to the actual environmental or economic benefits, that land use restrictions will increase the cost of housing and restrict economic opportunity, that infill possibilities are too limited to make a major difference to the structure of American cities, and that the government would need to coerce most people to live in a way that they do not want to in order to substantially change the impact of sprawl. They argue that the property market should be deregulated to allow different people to live as they wish, while providing a framework of market based fees (such as emission fees, congestion charging or road pricing) to mitigate many of the problems associated with sprawl such as congestion and increased pollution.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Starting in the early 20th century, environmentalist opposition to urban sprawl began to coalesce, with roots in the garden city movement, as well as pressure from campaign groups such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).


title: Urban sprawl

text: Under Herbert Morrison's 1934 leadership of the London County Council, the first formal proposal was made by the Greater London Regional Planning Committee "to provide a reserve supply of public open spaces and of recreational areas and to establish a green belt or girdle of open space". It was again included in an advisory Greater London Plan prepared by Patrick Abercrombie in 1944. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 expressly incorporated green belts into all further national urban developments.


title: Urban sprawl

text: New provisions for compensation in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act allowed local authorities around the country to incorporate green belt proposals in their first development plans. The codification of Green Belt policy and its extension to areas other than London came with the historic Circular 42/55 inviting local planning authorities to consider the establishment of Green Belts. The first urban growth boundary in the U.S. was in Fayette County, Kentucky, in 1958.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Maryland underwent many "Smart Growth" initiatives, starting in 1997 with the Smart Growth Areas Act. This act allocated funding towards areas that either were already undergoing growth, or areas that had plans of growth. Maryland also implemented the 1997 Rural Legacy Act, which distributed grants to private land owners and allowed them to purchase development rights. Brownfields Voluntary Cleanup and Revitalization Incentive Programs also incentivized the usage of previously contaminated properties by allowing property owners to avoid liability for the property. The state also offered incentives, such as tax breaks and loans for repairs to contaminated areas. Another program created by the state of Maryland was the Job Creation Tax Credit Program, which encouraged businesses to relocate into select areas, reducing the intensity of urban sprawl in some areas. The Live Near Your Work Program also incentivized employees to purchase homes in areas closer to their work. This led to a reduced commute time, and more of an emphasis on homeownership rather than renting.


title: Urban sprawl

text: The term 'smart growth' has been particularly used in North America. The terms 'compact city' and 'urban intensification' are often used to describe similar concepts in Europe, and particularly in the UK, where it has influenced government policy and planning practice in recent years.


title: Urban sprawl

text: The state of Oregon enacted a law in 1973 limiting the area urban areas could occupy, through urban growth boundaries. As a result, Portland, the state's largest urban area, has become a leader in smart growth policies that seek to make urban areas more compact (they are called urban consolidation policies). After the creation of this boundary, the population density of the urbanized area increased somewhat (from 1,135 in 1970 to 1,290 per km in 2000.) Although the growth boundary has not been tight enough to vastly increase density, the consensus is that the growth boundaries have protected great amounts of wild areas and farmland around the metro area.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Much of San Francisco Bay Area has also adopted urban growth boundaries; 25 of its cities and 5 of its counties have urban growth boundaries. Many of these were adopted with the support and advocacy of Greenbelt Alliance, a non-profit land conservation and urban planning organization.


title: Urban sprawl

text: In other areas, the design principles of District Regionalism and New Urbanism have been employed to combat urban sprawl. The concept of circular flow land use management has been developed in Europe to reduce land take by urban sprawl through promoting inner-city and brownfield development.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Although cities such as Los Angeles are well known for sprawling suburbs, policies and public opinion are changing. Transit-oriented development, in which higher-density mixed-use areas are permitted or encouraged near transit stops, is encouraging more compact development in certain areas: particularly those with light and heavy rail transit systems.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Bicycles are the preferred means of travel in many countries: Also, bicycles are permitted in public transit. Businesses in areas of some towns in which bicycle use is high are thriving. Bicycles and transit contribute in two important ways toward the success of businesses:


title: Urban sprawl

text: Walkability is a measure of how friendly an area is to walking. Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. However, evaluating walkability is challenging because it requires the consideration of many subjective factors. Factors influencing walkability include the presence or absence and quality of footpaths, sidewalks, or other pedestrian right-of-ways, traffic and road conditions, land use patterns, building accessibility, and safety, among others. Walkability is an important concept in sustainable urban design.


title: Urban sprawl

text: Land use policies are one potential avenue to reduce the effects of urban sprawl. These policies take the form of boundaries to urban growth, regional development rights, and development centralized in urban cities. Housing policies, such as inclusionary zoning, rental vouchers in suburban areas, and a focus on employer-assisted housing are another approach to combatting urban sprawl. Gasoline taxes and increased funding towards the construction of public transportation also help to reduce the necessity of commuting in and out of urban areas.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Jennifer Dulos ( Farber; born September 27, 1968) is an American woman who went missing on May 24, 2019. Authorities suspect that she was killed in a violent attack at her home in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her husband, Fotis Dulos, and his girlfriend, Michelle Troconis, were arrested on charges of tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution in connection with Jennifer's disappearance. Later, the two along with Fotis' attorney Kent Mawhinney faced additional charges related to Jennifer's murder. Fotis died by suicide in January 2020. , neither Troconis nor Mawhinney have had their day in court, so none of the accused have yet been proven guilty.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Jennifer and Fotis were in the midst of both a contentious divorce and child-custody proceedings. Police suspect that Fotis had been lying in wait for Jennifer and attacked her when she arrived at her home, after dropping her children off at school. Police allege that he and Troconis drove to Hartford to dispose of garbage bags containing items with Jennifer's blood on them on the night that Jennifer disappeared. Police further allege that Mawhinney conspired with Fotis and Troconis. If convicted, they will spend life behind bars.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Jennifer Farber Dulos (born September 27, 1968) was born in New York City to Gloria Ortenberg and Hilliard Farber, a banker and philanthropist respectively. She has an older sister, Melissa Irene Farber. Jennifer's maternal aunt and uncle, Elizabeth Claiborne and Arthur Ortenberg, founded the fashion company Liz Claiborne Inc. Jennifer graduated from Brown University in 1990, and later earned a master's degree in writing from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. A stay-at-home mother, Jennifer made her living as a writer for Patch.com, and also ran her own blog.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Fotis Dulos (August 6, 1967 January 30, 2020) was born in Turkey and grew up in Athens, Greece, moving to the U.S. in 1986. He graduated from Brown University in 1989, and later earned an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School. Fotis married Hilary Vanessa Aldama, also a Brown graduate, in Athens in June 2000. The marriage lasted four years, and they were divorced on July 12, 2004. That year Dulos founded Fore Group Inc., a real estate development company specializing in luxury homes based in Connecticut.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Dulos started emailing Farber, whom he'd also met at Brown, whilst still with his first wife. They married in Manhattan just over a month after Dulos' divorce, on August 28, 2004, and subsequently moved to Farmington, Connecticut. They had five children together, including two sets of twins, all named after Greek Orthodox saints three sons: Petros, Theodore, and Constantine; and two daughters: Christiane and Cleopatra Noelle.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: In a blog post on March 12, 2012, Jennifer alluded to trouble in her marriage: "I wish I were a strong person and that confrontation did not both scare and appall me." After the gradual breakdown of the marriage, in which Jennifer claimed Fotis was living an increasingly independent life, she filed for divorce on June 20, 2017, at Superior Court in Stamford. In the same month she started renting a house in New Canaan, about seventy miles southwest of Farmington, and moved there with her five children.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: In her divorce documents, Jennifer wrote: "I know that filing for divorce, and filing this motion will enrage him. I know he will retaliate by trying to harm me in some way." She also stated she believed he was having an affair with his colleague, Michelle Troconis, a native of Venezuela. Jennifer also alleged that Fotis had threatened to kidnap their children if she did not agree to his terms in the divorce settlement, and that he had bought a gun that year; Fotis denied making threats and claimed he bought the gun legally for home security. Both parents filed numerous motions claiming that the other was disparaging them.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Despite Jennifer's requesting an emergency order of custody, the couple were given temporary joint custody of their children until the end of the divorce proceedings. When Jennifer again requested an emergency order of custody in early 2018, the judge found that Fotis had broken numerous court orders. In March 2018 Jennifer was awarded sole physical custody of the children, while both parents were to share joint legal custody. Fotis was granted supervised visitation and monitored phone calls.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: In February 2018, after Jennifer's father's death, Gloria Farber, Jennifer's mother, sued Fotis for unpaid loans. She claimed he owed them $1.7 million loaned to him by his father-in-law Hilliard Farber.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Jennifer was last seen at around 8:00 am on May 24, 2019, when she dropped her children off at New Canaan Country School, and then at 8:05 am on a neighbor's security camera returning home. The same day, she missed two doctors' appointments that she had scheduled for 11:00 am and 1:00 pm in New York City. Later that evening, at around 7:00 pm, two of her friends, including her nanny Lauren Almeida, reported her missing after they failed to get in contact with her. Family and friends of Jennifer stated that it would be out of character for her to leave home on her own without telling anyone.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Almeida, who had arrived at the house at 11:30 am that day, later told detectives she was surprised to see Jennifer's Range Rover in the garage because she had planned to take it to her doctors' appointments instead of her Chevrolet Suburban, which was missing. When detectives searched the house, they found blood spatter on the floor, door and a wall in the garage, as well as on the exterior of the Range Rover. Blood was also found in the kitchen. DNA tests revealed most of the blood to be Jennifer's, apart from blood on the kitchen faucet, a mixture belonging to both her and her husband, Fotis. Police also found other evidence of Jennifer being the victim of a serious assault.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Jennifer's Chevrolet Suburban had been captured on the neighbor's security camera leaving her home at around 10:25 am that morning. Fotis was believed to be the one driving the victim's vehicle, carrying the body of Jennifer and other items associated with the probable cleanup. That same evening, at around 7:30 pm, Fotis and Troconis were captured on video dumping garbage bags in thirty bins in Hartford. The trash bags were found to contain various pieces of bloodied clothing, as well as bloodstained cleaning items. The blood was determined to be that of Jennifer. Fotis' DNA was found on the inside of a glove in one of the trash bags, and on one of the trash bags. The Suburban was later found at the side of a road near Waveny Park in New Canaan, just over three miles away from her home.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: At the time Jennifer went missing, she and her husband were estranged and still engaged in a tumultuous divorce. They were also involved in the ongoing contentious child-custody proceedings.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Police searched numerous properties in and around Farmington, in Fairfield County, and near Fotis' home without success. Investigators believe he arrived by bike to Jennifer's home due to tire marks found and other evidence. Fotis is believed to have been lying in wait for his estranged wife to return home, and killed her in the garage when she returned from dropping their kids at school. Helicopters were used to look for signs of Jennifer, as well as canine units and divers. There has been no activity on her credit cards and no calls made from her cell phone as of May 24.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: On January 19, 2021, the Connecticut State Police visited property on Mountain Spring Road in Farmington, which was once owned by Fotis' real estate company, to follow up on "old leads". Several authorities could be seen behind the property digging up the yard. Police also brought in Bob Perry, a nationally renowned expert at finding unmarked gravesites, though he would not say what, if anything, had been discovered. The next day, police returned to the Mountain Spring Road property with an excavator and a septic tank. Police briefly spoke with the media but said they did not have any updates.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: On June 1, 2019, Fotis and Troconis were arrested at a hotel in Avon, Connecticut, and charged with tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution. Not enough evidence existed at that time to warrant any more serious charges. The Dulos' five children, then aged between 8 and 13, moved to New York City to live with Jennifer's mother, to whom a judge granted temporary custody.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Fotis hired attorney Norm Pattis to represent him. In an interview, prior to being hired by Fotis, Pattis had appeared convinced that Jennifer was dead. Fotis and Troconis both pleaded not guilty to the charges. They were again arrested for tampering with evidence, and again pleaded not guilty, in September 2019. Fotis appeared in court on October 4 to seek a dismissal of the charges against him. The judge said he would review arguments by the defense and prosecution.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: In late October, it was reported Troconis, along with her 10-year-old daughter, had moved out of Fotis' $5 million home in Farmington.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: On January 7, 2020, Fotis was arrested at his home by the Connecticut State Police and charged with capital murder, murder, and kidnapping in relation to Jennifer's disappearance. Troconis was also arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Fotis' friend and former attorney, Kent Douglas Mawhinney (often misreported as Mahwinney), was also detained on January 7 and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Despite these arrests, Jennifer's body is yet to be found.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Mawhinney became estranged from his wife after being accused of spousal rape. His wife went to South Windsor police and told authorities that she feared Fotis and Mawhinney were working together to kill her. After Jennifer disappeared, a shallow grave was discovered at a secluded property that Mawhinney owned, filled with two bags of lime and a blue tarp. Authorities and a sniffer dog discovered the grave in August 2019, but no body was found in the grave, and said items were found to have been removed.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Jennifer's family issued a statement after the arrests: "Although we are relieved that the wait for these charges is over, for us, there is no sense of closure. Nothing can bring Jennifer back. We miss her every day and will forever mourn her loss."


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: On January 8, Fotis' bond was set at $6 million. He was released the following day and was due to return to court on February 28, 2020.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: In a statement issued in May 2020, Troconis said it was a "mistake" to have trusted Fotis, but maintained that she did not know what happened to Jennifer or of her whereabouts. Troconis, out on bail, was next scheduled to appear in court on August 6 2020, to face the charges. Mawhinney was being held in lieu of $2 million bond, but the bond was reduced to $246,000 and he was released October 19, 2020.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: While out on bail, Dulos failed to appear in court on January 28, 2020, for an emergency bond hearing. He was found in an unresponsive state by police at his home in Farmington, having poisoned himself with carbon monoxide by running a vacuum-cleaner hose from the exhaust pipe of his SUV into the interior of the car while it was parked in his garage. Initially, it was reported by some news outlets that Fotis had been found dead, but responders had performed CPR and restored a faint pulse. They transported him by ambulance to UConn Medical Center in Farmington, and from there he was airlifted to Jacobi Medical Center in The Bronx to undergo hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Fotis' five children, whose ages ranged from 8 to 13 when their mother disappeared eight months earlier, visited him at the medical center before he was taken off life support. This marked the first time they had seen their father since he was accused of murdering their mother.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: Fotis was pronounced dead at Jacobi Medical Center on January 30, 2020. He was 52 years old. He had left a suicide note in his car that read, "I refuse to spend even an hour more in jail for something I had NOTHING to do with".


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: In the police report, it states that Fotis' new girlfriend, Anna Curry, was at his home the morning of his suicide. They had planned to drive to the courthouse in Stamford together, but Fotis said that they should drive separately. On the way to the courthouse, Curry received a call from Pattis asking where his client was. She told him that they were driving separately, but the lawyer informed her that Fotis' GPS tracker showed that he was still at home, at which point Curry realized that he must have done something to harm himself and asked Pattis to call 9-1-1.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: "Dateline NBC" aired the episode "Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos" on 9 September 2019. A followup episode entitled "The Day Jennifer Disappeared" aired on 2 September 2022.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: The documentary "Vanished in New Canaan: An ID Mystery", which premiered on Investigation Discovery on June 1, 2020, attempts to piece together the facts of Jennifer Dulos' disappearance. The documentary gives an insight into how Jennifer and her estranged husband met at Brown University and started a family. A group of experts and witnesses dissect the events of the case.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: The case was covered in a 2021 Lifetime television film, "Gone Mom: The Jennifer Dulos story", with Annabeth Gish as Jennifer Dulos and Warren Christie as Fotis Dulos.


title: Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos

text: In May 2021, a domestic violence bill so-called "Jennifers' Law" received near unanimous support in the Connecticut State Senate. The proposed law is named after Jennifer Dulos and other victims of domestic violence in Connecticut, Jennifer Magnano, who was murdered in 2007 by her husband, Scott Magnano, in Terryville, Connecticut. Scott Magnano committed suicide immediately after murdering his wife, in front of their three children. On June 28, 2021, Governor Ned Lamont signed the bill into law.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Gulf War syndrome or Gulf War illness is a chronic and multi-symptomatic disorder affecting military veterans of both sides of the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War. A wide range of acute and chronic symptoms have been linked to it, including fatigue, muscle pain, cognitive problems, insomnia, rashes and diarrhea. Approximately 250,000 of the 697,000 U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War have enduring chronic multi-symptom illness, a condition with serious consequences.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The Royal British Legion said research suggested up to 33,000 UK Gulf War veterans could be living with the syndrome, with 1,300 claiming a war pension for conditions connected to their service. In 2007 the Royal British Legion produced a comprehensive report entitled "Legacy of Suspicion", which made recommendations about necessary research and compensation. The Royal British Legion is still campaigning for the UK government to properly address symptoms experienced by veterans of the Gulf War.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: From 1995 to 2005, the health of combat veterans worsened in comparison with nondeployed veterans, with the onset of more new chronic diseases, functional impairment, repeated clinic visits and hospitalizations, chronic fatigue syndrome-like illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and greater persistence of adverse health incidents.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Exposure to pesticides and exposure to pills containing pyridostigmine bromide (used as a pretreatment to protect against nerve agent effects) has been found to be associated with the neurological effects seen in Gulf War syndrome. Other causes that have been investigated are sarin, cyclosarin, and emissions from oil well fires, but their relationship to the illness is not as clear.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Studies have consistently indicated that Gulf War syndrome is not the result of combat or other stressors and that Gulf War veterans have lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than veterans of other wars.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: According to a 2013 report by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may also have Gulf War syndrome, though later findings identified causes that would not have been present in those wars.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: In 2022, researchers led by Robert Haley, MD at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that exposure to sarin nerve gas in soldiers who had a particular genetic mutation that prevented them from breaking down the nerve gas is likely to be responsible for the syndrome. The findings and an editorial by two leading epidemiologists were published in "Environmental Health Perspectives".


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: According to an April 2010 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) sponsored study conducted by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 250,000 of the 696,842 U.S. servicemen and women in the 1991 Gulf War continue to be affected by chronic multi-symptom illness, which the IOM now refers to as "Gulf War illness". The IOM found that it continued to affect these veterans nearly 20 years after the war.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: According to the IOM, "It is clear that a significant portion of the soldiers deployed to the Gulf War have experienced troubling constellations of symptoms that are difficult to categorize," said committee chair Stephen L. Hauser, professor and chair, department of neurology, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Questions still exist regarding why certain veterans showed, and still show, medically unexplained symptoms while others did not, why symptoms are diverse in some and specific in others, and why combat exposure is not consistently linked to having or not having symptoms. The lack of data on veterans' pre-deployment and immediate post-deployment health status and lack of measurement and monitoring of the various substances to which veterans may have been exposed make it difficult—and in many cases impossible—to reconstruct what happened to service members during their deployments nearly 20 years after the fact, the committee noted. The report called for a substantial commitment to improving identification and treatment of multisymptom illness in Gulf War veterans focussing on continued monitoring of Gulf War veterans, improved medical care, examination of genetic differences between symptomatic and asymptomatic groups and studies of environment-gene interactions.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Birth defects have been suggested as a consequence of Gulf War deployment. However, a 2006 review of several studies of international coalition veterans' children found no strong or consistent evidence of an increase in birth defects, finding a modest increase in birth defects that was within the range of the general population, in addition to being unable to exclude recall bias as an explanation for the results. A 2008 report stated that "it is difficult to draw firm conclusions related to birth defects and pregnancy outcomes in Gulf War veterans", observing that while there have been "significant, but modest, excess rates of birth defects in children of Gulf War veterans", the "overall rates are still within the normal range found in the general population". The same report called for more research on the issue.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: A 2017 study by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found that veterans possibly exposed to chemical warfare agents at Khamisiyah experienced different patterns of brain cancer mortality risk compared to the other groups, with veterans possibly exposed having a higher risk of brain cancer in the time period immediately following the Gulf War.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Although an understudied group, opposing Iraqi veterans of the Iraqi Army in the Gulf War also experienced acute and chronic symptoms associated with Gulf War syndrome. A 2011 study in the U.S Army Medical Department Journal reported Iraqi veterans of the Gulf War had a higher prevalence of somatic disorders as compared to Iraqi civilians, with risk greater in troops stationed in Kuwait.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The United States Congress mandated the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' contract with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to provide reports on Gulf War illnesses. Since 1998, the NAS's Institute of Medicine (IOM) has authored ten such reports. In addition to the many physical and psychological issues involved in any war zone deployment, Gulf War veterans were exposed to a unique mix of hazards not previously experienced during wartime. These included pyridostigmine bromide pills (given to protect troops from the effects of nerve agents), depleted uranium munitions, and multiple simultaneous vaccinations including anthrax and botulinum toxin vaccines. The oil and smoke that spewed for months from hundreds of burning oil wells presented another exposure hazard not previously encountered in a war zone. Military personnel also had to cope with swarms of insects, requiring the widespread use of pesticides. High-powered microwaves were used to disrupt Iraqi communications, and though it is unknown whether this might have contributed to the syndrome, research has suggested that safety limits for electromagnetic radiation are too lenient.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses (RAC), a VA federal advisory committee mandated by Congress in legislation enacted in 1998, found that pre-2005 studies suggested the veterans' illnesses are neurological and apparently are linked to exposure to neurotoxins, such as the nerve gas sarin, the anti-nerve gas drug pyridostigmine bromide, and pesticides that affect the nervous system. The RAC concluded in 2004 that, "research studies conducted since the war have consistently indicated that psychiatric illness, combat experience or other deployment-related stressors do not explain Gulf War veterans illnesses in the large majority of ill veterans."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The RAC concluded that "exposure to pesticides and/or to PB [pyridostigmine bromide nerve agent protective pills] are causally associated with GWI and the neurological dysfunction in GW veterans. Exposure to sarin and cyclosarin and to oil well fire emissions are also associated with neurologically based health effects, though their contribution to development of the disorder known as GWI is less clear. Gene-environment interactions are likely to have contributed to development of GWI in deployed veterans. The health consequences of chemical exposures in the GW and other conflicts have been called "toxic wounds" by veterans. This type of injury requires further study and concentrated treatment research efforts that may also benefit other occupational groups with similar exposure-related illnesses."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Depleted uranium (DU) was widely used in tank kinetic energy penetrator and autocannon rounds for the first time ever during the Gulf War and has been suggested as a possible cause of Gulf War syndrome. A 2008 review by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found no association between DU exposure and multisymptom illness, concluding that "exposure to DU munitions is not likely a primary cause of Gulf War illness". However, there are suggestions that long-term exposure to high doses of DU may cause other health problems unrelated to GWI.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: More recent medical literature reviews disagree, stating for example that, "the number of Gulf War veterans who developed the Gulf War syndrome following exposure to high quantities of DU has risen to about one-third of the 800,000 U.S. forces deployed," with 25,000 of those having had a premature death. Since 2011, US combat veterans may claim disability compensation for health problems related to exposure to depleted uranium. The Veterans Administration decides these claims on a case-by-case basis.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: A team at the University of Portsmouth led by Professor Randall Parrish tested urine samples of 154 US veterans in 2021, reporting that no soldiers with the syndrome were exposed to significant amounts of depleted uranium and that it "is not and never was in the bodies of those who are ill at sufficient quantities to cause disease".


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The US military issued pyridostigmine bromide (PB) pills to protect against exposure to nerve gas agents such as sarin and soman. PB was used as a prophylactic against nerve agents; it is not a vaccine. Taken before exposure to nerve agents, PB was thought to increase the efficiency of nerve agent antidotes. PB had been used since 1955 for patients who have myasthenia gravis with doses up to 1,500 mg a day, far in excess of the 90 mg given to soldiers, and was considered safe by the FDA at either level for indefinite use and its use to pre-treat nerve agent exposure had recently been approved.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Given both the large body of epidemiological data on myasthenia gravis patients and follow-up studies done on veterans it was concluded that while it was unlikely that health effects reported today by Gulf War veterans are the result of exposure solely to PB, use of PB was causally associated with illness. However, a later review by the Institute of Medicine concluded that the evidence was not strong enough to establish a causal relationship.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Organophosphate-induced delayed neuropathy (OPIDN, aka organophosphate-induced delayed polyneuropathy) may contribute to the unexplained illnesses of the Gulf War veterans.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The use of organophosphate pesticides and insect repellents during the first Gulf War is credited with keeping rates of pest-borne diseases low. Pesticide use is one of only two exposures consistently identified by Gulf War epidemiologic studies to be significantly associated with Gulf War illness. Multisymptom illness profiles similar to Gulf War illness have been associated with low-level pesticide exposures in other human populations. In addition, Gulf War studies have identified dose-response effects, indicating that greater pesticide use is more strongly associated with Gulf War illness than more limited use. Pesticide use during the Gulf War has also been associated with neurocognitive deficits and neuroendocrine alterations in Gulf War veterans in clinical studies conducted following the end of the war. The 2008 report concluded that "all available sources of evidence combine to support a consistent and compelling case that pesticide use during the Gulf War is causally associated with Gulf War illness."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Many of the symptoms of Gulf War illness are similar to the symptoms of organophosphate, mustard gas, and nerve gas poisoning. Gulf War veterans were exposed to a number of sources of these compounds, including nerve gas and pesticides.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Chemical detection units from Czechoslovakia, France, and Britain confirmed chemical agents. French detection units detected chemical agents. Both Czech and French forces reported detections immediately to U.S. forces. U.S. forces detected, confirmed, and reported chemical agents; and U.S. soldiers were awarded medals for detecting chemical agents. The Riegle Report said that chemical alarms went off 18,000 times during the Gulf War. After the air war started on January 16, 1991, coalition forces were chronically exposed to low, nonlethal levels of chemical and biological agents released primarily by direct Iraqi attack via missiles, rockets, artillery, or aircraft munitions and by fallout from allied bombings of Iraqi chemical warfare munitions facilities.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Over 125,000 U.S. troops and 9,000 U.K. troops were exposed to nerve gas and mustard gas when the Iraqi depot in Khamisiyah was destroyed.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Recent studies have confirmed earlier suspicions that exposure to sarin, in combination with other contaminants such as pesticides and PB were related to reports of veteran illness. Estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 individuals exposed to nerve agents.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: While low-level exposure to nerve agents has been suggested as the cause of GWI, the 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War illnesses (RAC) stated that "evidence is inconsistent or limited in important ways." The VA's 2014 RAC report concluded that, "exposure to the nerve gas agents sarin/cyclosarin has been linked in two more studies to changes in structural magnetic resonance imaging findings that are associated with cognitive decrements, further supporting the conclusion from evidence reviewed in the 2008 report that exposure to these agents is etiologically important to the central nervous system dysfunction that occurs in some subsets of Gulf War veterans."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: A 2022 study by Dr. Robert W. Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, "et al.", of 1,016 U.S. Gulf War veterans found evidence of a causal link between GWI and exposure to low levels of sarin, which was released into the air by coalition bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons facilities. Significantly, the study found an increased incidence of GWI not only among veterans who recounted hearing nerve agent alarms, but also among veterans with the RR or QR (as opposed to the QQ) forms of the PON1 gene, which produces an enzyme that deactivates organophosphates (including sarin) through hydrolysis. By contrast, GWI was "inversely" associated with higher levels of the type Q isozyme, which is more efficient at breaking down sarin than its type R counterpart. The authors "found that the PON1 genotype and hearing nerve agent alarms were independent and the findings robust to both measured and unmeasured confounding, supporting a mechanistic [gene–environment] interaction. ... Moreover, the change in the combined effect from one category to the next was significantly greater than the sum of the independent effects of the environmental exposure and the genotype". Although organophosphate pesticides could have triggered the nerve agent alarms in use at the time and contributed to neurotoxic symptoms similar to GWI, Haley "et al." ruled out pesticides as a primary cause of GWI, citing that pesticide use was "ubiquitous long before the approximately 10,000 alarms began sounding at the start of the air campaign when Coalition bombing of Iraqi chemical weapon facilities released the fallout cloud that reached U.S. troop concentrations just as sarin was detected at multiple sites," while "the PON1 R isoenzyme is the more efficient detoxifier of most pesticides."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: According to the VA's 2008 RAC report, "For several Gulf War exposures, an association with Gulf War illness cannot be ruled out. These include low-level exposure to nerve agents, close proximity to oil well fires, receipt of multiple vaccines, and effects of combinations of Gulf War exposures." However, several potential causes of GWI were deemed, "not likely to have caused Gulf War illness for the majority of ill veterans," including "depleted uranium, anthrax vaccine, fuels, solvents, sand and particulates, infectious diseases, and chemical agent resistant coating (CARC)," for which "there is little evidence supporting an association with Gulf War illness or a major role is unlikely based on what is known about exposure patterns during the Gulf War and more recent deployments."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The VA's 2014 RAC report reinforced its 2008 report findings: "The research reviewed in this report supports and reinforces the conclusion in the 2008 RACGWVI report that exposures to pesticides and pyridostigmine bromide are causally associated with Gulf War illness. Evidence also continues to demonstrate that Gulf War illness is not the result of psychological stressors during the war." It also found additional evidence since the 2008 report for the role of sarin in GWI, but inadequate evidence regarding exposures to oil well fires, vaccines, and depleted uranium to make new conclusions about them.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: During the war, many oil wells were set on fire in Kuwait by the retreating Iraqi army, and the smoke from those fires was inhaled by large numbers of soldiers, many of whom had acute pulmonary and other chronic effects, including asthma and bronchitis. However, firefighters who were assigned to the oil well fires and encountered the smoke, but who did not take part in combat, have not had GWI symptoms. The 2008 RAC report states that "evidence [linking oil well fires to GWI] is inconsistent or limited in important ways."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Iraq had loaded anthrax, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxin into missiles and artillery shells in preparing for the Gulf War and these munitions were deployed to four locations in Iraq. During Operation Desert Storm, 41% of U.S. combat soldiers and 75% of UK combat soldiers were vaccinated against anthrax. Reactions included local skin irritation, some lasting for weeks or months. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the vaccine, it never went through large-scale clinical trials.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: While recent studies have demonstrated the vaccine is highly reactogenic, there is no clear evidence or epidemiological studies on Gulf War veterans linking the vaccine to Gulf War illness. Combining this with the lack of symptoms from current deployments of individuals who have received the vaccine led the Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses to conclude that the vaccine is not a likely cause of Gulf War illness for most ill veterans. However, the committee report does point out that veterans who received a larger number of various vaccines in advance of deployment have shown higher rates of persistent symptoms since the war.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: However, research was done by PB Asa, Y Cao, and RF Garry on serum antibodies to squalene in Gulf War Syndrome patients. The results showed "the substantial majority (95%) of overtly ill deployed GWS patients had antibodies to squalene. All (100%) GWS patients immunized for service in Desert Shield/Desert Storm who did not deploy, but had the same signs and symptoms as those who did deploy, had antibodies to squalene. In contrast, none (0%) of the deployed Persian Gulf veterans not showing signs and symptoms of GWS have antibodies to squalene. Neither patients with idiopathic autoimmune disease nor healthy controls had detectable serum antibodies to squalene." Their work of the researchers was profiled by Gary Matsumoto in "Vaccine A".


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: This research and theory was later criticized, and further research has leaned heavily against squalene in vaccinations causing GWS; Perhaps the most important points against this theory include that squalene antibodies have been detected in populations not exposed to squalene containing vaccinations, and that the anthrax vaccines used in the Gulf War did not actually contain squalene in any form.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Research studies conducted since the war have consistently indicated that psychiatric illness, combat experience or other deployment-related stressors do not explain Gulf War veterans illnesses in the large majority of ill veterans, according to a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) review committee.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: An April 2010 Institute of Medicine review found, "the excess of unexplained medical symptoms reported by deployed [1991] Gulf war veterans cannot be reliably ascribed to any known psychiatric disorder", although they also concluded that "the constellation of unexplained symptoms associated with the Gulf War illness complex could result from interplay between both biological and psychological factors."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The 2008 VA report on "Gulf War illness and the Health of Gulf War Veterans" suggested a possible link between GWI and chronic, nonspecific inflammation of the central nervous system that cause pain, fatigue and memory issues, possibly due to pathologically persistent increases in cytokines and suggested further research be conducted on this issue.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Clinical diagnosis of Gulf War illness has been complicated by multiple case definitions. In 2014, the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine (IOM)—contracted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for the task—released a report concluding that the creation of a new case definition for chronic multisymptom illness in Gulf War veterans was not possible because of insufficient evidence in published studies regarding its onset, duration, severity, frequency of symptoms, exclusionary criteria, and laboratory findings. Instead, the report recommended the use of two case definitions, the "Kansas" definition and the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)" definition, noting: "There is a set of symptoms (fatigue, pain, neurocognitive) that are reported in all the studies that have been reviewed. The CDC definition captures those three symptoms; the Kansas definition also captures them, but it also includes the symptoms reported most frequently by Gulf War veterans."


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The Kansas case definition is more specific and may be more applicable for research settings, while the CDC case definition is more broad and may be more applicable for clinical settings.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Medical ailments associated with service in the 1990–1991 Gulf War have been recognized by both the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: Before 1998, the terms "Gulf War syndrome, Gulf War veterans' illness, unexplained illness", and "undiagnosed illness" were used interchangeably to describe chronic unexplained symptoms in veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. The term "chronic multisymptom illness" (CMI) was first used following publication of a 1998 study describing chronic unexplained symptoms in Air Force veterans of the 1991 Gulf War.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: In a 2014 report contracted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine recommended the use the term "Gulf War illness" rather than "chronic multisymptom illness". Since that time, relevant publications by the National Academy of Science and the U.S. Department of Defense have used only the term "Gulf War illness" (GWI).


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) confusingly still uses an array of both old and new terminology for "Gulf War illness". VA's specialty clinical evaluation War Related Illness and Injury Study Centers (WRIISCs) use the recommended term "Gulf War illness", as do VA's Office of Research and Development (VA-ORD) and many recent VA research publications. However, VA's Public Health website still uses "Gulf War veterans' medically unexplained illnesses", "chronic multi-symptom illness" (CMI), and "undiagnosed illnesses", but explains that VA doesn't use the term "Gulf War syndrome" because of varying symptoms.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) originally classified individuals with related ailments believed to be connected to their service in the Persian Gulf a special non-ICD-9 code DX111, as well as ICD-9 code V65.5.


title: Gulf War syndrome

text: In 1998, the State of Kansas Persian Gulf Veterans Health Initiative sponsored an epidemiological survey led by Dr. Lea Steele of deployment-related symptoms in 2,030 Gulf War veterans. The result was a "clinically based descriptive definition using correlated symptoms" in six symptom groups: fatigue and sleep problems, pain, neurologic and mood, gastrointestinal, respiratory symptoms, and skin (dermatologic) symptoms.