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CONTRACT SUMMARY 7 CONTRACT SUMMARY The overall goal of the Columbia University research effort was to determine whether a valid and useful method could be developed for estimating Vietnam veterans' opportunity to be exposed to herbicides on the basis of historical reconstruction of relevant military records. The conceptual framework for the overall project included research on and quality control for the identification and reconstruction of military records, development and testing of exposure-opportunity models that used those records, and research on selected Vietnam veterans to understand the extent to which covariates or confounders need to be taken into account in epidemiologic studies of the health effects of herbicides on Vietnam veterans. The goal was to elucidate the basic determinants of exposure: person, place, and time. With regard to person, the aim was to identify the specific locations of a veteran's military unit6 and the specific tasks that may have resulted in exposure to herbicides. The Columbia University researchers were also interested in elucidating in- service and post-service experiences that might have affected any potential response to herbicide exposure so that they could be controlled for in future epidemiologic studies. They aimed to determine the extent to which the long period since the end of the spraying activities could affect a veteran's recall and the researchers' ability to identify and locate potential epidemiologic cohort members.7 With respect to place and time, the researchers' goals were to optimize the quality of the data available on herbicide spraying and to develop statistically robust models for herbicide-exposure opportunity for the entire period of the Vietnam War. Another research aim was to provide guidance for future epidemiologic studies on the degree to which important confounders and covariates might influence the outcome of epidemiologic health studies with respect to herbicide exposures. On the basis of previous studies of veterans' 6 Several terms are used to specify the organizational position and size of a military unit. The primary terms used in the US Army during the war were corps, division, brigade, battalion, company, platoon and squadron. Other services used different designations. 7 All protocols involving human subjects were submitted to the Columbia University Institutional Review Board and were approved. They included procedures and systems for preventing records access by persons who were not members of the study team.
