Strategies to Protect the Health of Deployed U.S. Forces Medical Surveillance, Record Keeping, and Risk Reduction (1999) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 15-20
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From page 15... ...
Department of Veterans Affairs, 1996~. Deputy Secretary of Defense John White met with leadership of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine to explore the idea of an independent, proactive effort to learn from lessons of the Gulf War and to develop a strategy to better protect the health of troops in future deployments.
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From page 16... ...
Specific issues to be addressed include: Prevention of adverse health outcomes that could result from exposures to threats and risks including chemical warfare and biological warfare, infectious disease, psychological stress, heat and cold injuries, unintentional injuries; Requirements for compliance with active duty retention standards; Pre-deployment screening, physical evaluation, risk education for troops and medical personnel; Vaccine and other prophylactic agents; improvements in risk communication with military personnel in order to minimize stress casualties among exposed, or potentially exposed personnel; Improvements in the reintegration of all troops to the home environment; Treatment of the health consequences of prevention failures, including battle injuries, disease and non-battle injury (DNBI) , acute management, and longterm follow-up; Surveillance for short- and long-term outcomes, to include adverse reproductive outcomes; and Improvement in keeping medical records, perhaps using entirely new technology, in documenting exposures, treatment, tracking of individuals through the
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From page 17... ...
Briefly, one of the lessons was that even in the absence of widespread acute casualties from battle, war takes its toll on human health and well-being long after the shooting or bombing stops. A1though military preventive medicine programs have developed reasonably effective countermeasures against many of the discrete disease and non-battle injury hazards of deployment, they have not yet systematically addressed the medically unexplained symptoms seen not only after the Gulf War but also after major wars dating back at least to the Civil War.
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From page 18... ...
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) , the capture of any data on their health care is problematic, as is the concept of a true lifetime medical record promised by the President in 1997 (White House, Office ofthe Press Secretary, 1997~.
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From page 19... ...
Finally, a recent DoD Broad Agency Announcement invited proposals for research related to war-related illnesses (Commerce Business Daily, 1999~. STUDY PROCESS AND INFORMATION SOURCES The study presented in this report was led by two principal investigators: an infectious disease specialist and a psychiatrist.
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From page 20... ...
Medical surveillance permits the identification of problems and opportunities for intervention, and the associated record keeping permits additional benefit from retrospective analysis. Coupled with these, research and intervention efforts directed towards medically unexplained symptoms will provide important tools for the future military.
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