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Suggested Citation:"ACCOMPLISHMENTS." Institute of Medicine. 2003. Characterizing Exposure of Veterans to Agent Orange and Other Herbicides Used in Vietnam: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10819.
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Page 24
Suggested Citation:"ACCOMPLISHMENTS." Institute of Medicine. 2003. Characterizing Exposure of Veterans to Agent Orange and Other Herbicides Used in Vietnam: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10819.
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Page 25

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MILITARY UNIT AND HERBICIDE SPRAYING DATABASES, AND EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT MODEL DEVELOPMENT 24 A text file containing 983 records of Chemical Corps officers and enlisted personnel was given to NAS to transfer to VA for transfer to NPRC. Each record contained either Army serial number or Social Security number. Of the 983 records, NPRC was able to match 218, 160 of them officers. Social Security numbers—the most straightforward means of tracing the veterans—were available for just 29 of these officers. Given the additional challenges of locating the surviving veterans in this truncated cohort and the fact that only some of them would have been involved in herbicide spraying operations, the researchers concluded that this approach was unlikely to yield enough data to warrant its pursuit. In consultation with the committee, the task was abandoned. CONTINUING WORK The researchers have indicated that they hope to pursue further information-gathering and analysis of veterans' exposure to herbicides, using funding from other sources. Among the materials submitted in fulfillment of the contract with NAS (listed in Appendix A) is a draft Web site and its associated documentation. The intent of the Web site is to gather voluntarily submitted information on the locations of military units that served in Vietnam directly from individuals or organizations. That would be used to fill gaps in data on the highly mobile combat units that served in Vietnam. ACCOMPLISHMENTS • Expansion and cleaning of an archive of previously tracked locations of combat battalions. • Development of an approach to classifying military units so that they can be broken down by the degree to which their mission required frequent changes in location. The approach has permitted the development of a database of locations of about 80% of all Army troops, most Air Force personnel, and Navy personnel assigned to construction battalions or permanent installations and calculation of exposure opportunity and hit scores for them.

MILITARY UNIT AND HERBICIDE SPRAYING DATABASES, AND EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT MODEL DEVELOPMENT 25 • Expansion and cleaning of herbicide-spray data (the HERBS and Service-HERBS files) that had been used extensively by the researchers and others in the past. That work has led to a substantially expanded inventory of spraying and to a higher estimate of the amount of dioxin likely to have been deposited in the Republic of Vietnam during the war. • Refinement of the computational approach of a previously developed EOI and refinement of the model itself to account for gallonage and direct-hit exposures better. • Development of a GIS for Vietnam into which were placed extensive databases, such as the HERBS file of spraying missions, an exposure table of hits and exposure-opportunity scores, military-unit identification codes, and military locations. • Design and development of a unique user-friendly software system—the Herbicide Exposure Assessment-Vietnam—that implements the GIS and may serve as an archetype for other epidemiologic software for GIS-based analyses. Exploiting the National Archives data resulted in a revision of both the tasks and the timetable for the Columbia University researchers' work. The committee, who were consulted on the changes, felt that they were appropriate and desirable. It should be noted that although these data have substantially expanded knowledge about spray activities, they do not constitute a complete accounting of all herbicide releases. Indeed, it is not possible to document the myriad opportunities for in-country exposure. The best that any database of wartime herbicide exposures can do is to provide a basis for better-informed epidemiologic studies of veterans.

Next: PROJECT 2: COVARIATES, CONFOUNDERS, AND CONSISTENCY: CHARACTERIZING THE VIETNAM VETERAN FOR EPIDEMIOLOGIC STUDIES »
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