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MILITARY UNIT AND HERBICIDE SPRAYING DATABASES, AND EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT MODEL DEVELOPMENT 12 6. Incorporate the final database into user-friendly software that will permit future investigators to use the models to assign exposures or to propose their own models. 7. Interview Division Chemical Officers who served in Vietnam and served as principal advisers to division commanders on the use of all chemicals to complete to the extent possible the record of known spraying missions. Thus, the central goal of the project was to develop a comprehensive database that contained all known information on the military herbicide spraying that had been carried out under Air Force Operation Ranch Hand; by the US Army for perimeter defense and other smaller localized purposes; and in other, unintentional releases. An additional database was planned to contain locations and dates of âresidenceâ of US military units stationed in Vietnam. CONSOLIDATION, QUALITY CONTROL, AND STANDARDIZATION OF DATABASES Before the initiation of the contract, a set of individual geographic locations of military units assigned to Vietnam were collected by Columbia University investigators Jeanne Mager Stellman and Steven D.Stellman for use in the Agent Orange Veterans Payment Program (AOVPP), in collaboration with Lt. Col. Richard Christian (ret.). The Drs. Stellman were consultants to the special master presiding over this program, which resulted from the Agent Orange Product Liability Litigationâa class-action lawsuit brought by Vietnam veterans and their families regarding injuries allegedly incurred as a result of the veterans' exposure to chemical herbicides during the Vietnam war. In that effort, the Columbia University researchers created a military-unit database for claim evaluation. The database contained about 500,000 records, each of which provided an exposure opportunity index10 for one military unit during a discrete period. The exposure of any individual claimant was calculated by summing the tabled exposures for his or her unit(s) during service in Vietnam. The database, the âMilitary Unit 10 This exposure opportunity index (EOI) is an earlier formulation of the E4 EOI that was developed under the contract. In general, an EOI may be defined as an estimate of the possibility that a person will come into contact with a toxic chemical without regard to route of entry or later metabolism.
