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Strategies to Protect the Health of Deployed U.S. Forces: Detecting, Characterizing, and Documenting Exposures
potentially harmful agents, including chemical and/or biological (CB)1 warfare agents and other harmful agents.
Evaluate the efficacy and implementation of current policies, doctrine, and training and identify opportunities for adjusting or augmenting strategies to provide better protection in future deployments.
Review and evaluate tools and methods for tracking and characterizing inventories of CB agents in the deployed theater; for tracking and characterizing the locations and time-activity patterns of deployed military personnel; for detecting and monitoring concentrations of potentially harmful agents; for estimating exposure concentrations and patterns of exposure for individuals or groups; and for implementation (e.g., documenting exposures).2
Conduct of the Study
The principal investigator, an expert in exposure assessment, conducted the study with the help of National Research Council (NRC) staff, who collected data, and an advisory panel that reviewed the report while it was being developed and furnished additional information. Other sources of information included reports and databases of regulatory and research organizations, experts in relevant disciplines, meetings with DoD representatives, and reviews of relevant documents (e.g., field manuals) and literature.
Study Approach
This study focuses on technologies for detecting and monitoring concentrations of agents and for tracking exposures of troops to those agents. The study also includes a review of the overall framework in which these technologies could be used. No attempt was made to assess the budgetary impact on DoD of adopting some or all of the recommendations in this report. The study excludes the many computing, information processing, data storage, and communications technologies being developed, mostly in the private sector. DoD's use of these technologies has been investigated in many other reports; and it is widely agreed that future military
1
In this report, the acronym CB refers to chemical and/or biological agents that can be used as weapons.
2
In this study, the terms detecting, monitoring, and tracking are differentiated as follows. Detecting is the process of determining the presence of agents. Monitoring is the process of collecting data to develop space and time profiles of agent concentrations. Tracking provides information on both the geographic locations of troops and on their activities at those locations (e.g., marching, operating inside a vehicle, sleeping in a tent, or eating).
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