Protecting Those Who Serve Strategies to Protect the Health of Deployed U.S. Forces (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix C: Strategies to Protect the Health of Deployed U.S. Forces: Detecting, Characterizing, and Documenting Exposures--Executive Summary
Appendix C: Strategies to Protect the Health of Deployed U.S. Forces: Detecting, Characterizing, and Documenting Exposures--Executive Summary
Pages 54-68
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From page 54... ...
Task of This Study The objectives of this study are listed below: · Assess current and potential future approaches used by DoD for detecting and tracking exposures of military personnel to potentially harmful agents, in54
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From page 55... ...
· 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)
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From page 56... ...
Although the military offers substantial guidance for protecting personnel against chemical attacks, it also acknowledges that its detection capabilities (especially for biological agents) are limited and is working to improve its equipment.
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From page 57... ...
DoD is also aware of the need to collect and store information on low-level exposures to CB agents and other harmful substances. The low-level issue involves not only improved technology and equipment, but also interpreting trends from measurements collected near the detection limits of equipment and using exposure data for a representative fraction of the exposed population.3 Finding: To date, exposure assessments for both civilian and military populations have focused primarily on exposures to contaminants in a specific medium (e.g., air, water, soil, food)
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From page 58... ...
However, current technology limits personal monitoring of many toxic gases and particulate matter to the use of active monitoring, which is a complex process. Recommendation: The Department of Defense should explore and evaluate the use of personal monitors for detecting chemical and biological agents, toxic industrial chemicals, and other harmful agents at low levels.
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From page 59... ...
Although an acute threshold concentration for chemical agents can be characterized and a safety factor establishing a low-level exposure can be applied, this information is rarely available for biological agents. Finding: Because little information is currently available to relate long-term health effects to low-dose or low-dose-rate exposures to chemical agents, it is extremely difficult to set performance criteria for detecting and monitoring concentrations of these agents to assess long-term health effects.
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Recommendation: The Department of Defense should increase its efforts to collect and evaluate low-level dose-response data for a broad set of biological agents. The data should include information on the infectivity of a range of both warfare and endemic biological agents.
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From page 61... ...
However, when assessing low-level, long-term, or episodic exposures to either CB agents or TICs, persistent and indirect pathways must also be investigated. Total exposure assessments must take into account ambient concentrations of harmful agents in multiple environmental media (e.g., air, water, solid surfaces)
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From page 62... ...
Gulf War veterans had ample opportunities to be exposed to these substances in many different combinations, and interactions can be cumulative, synergistic, or antagonistic. The risk assessment community has done very little research to provide exposure assessments of the combined health impacts of even two interacting agents.
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From page 63... ...
Current and planned detection equipment is primarily designed to detect nerve and blister chemical agents. TICs have not been given as high a priority.
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From page 64... ...
TRACKING DEPLOYED MILITARY PERSONNEL A full characterization of an individual's exposure requires knowing where that person is and what (ache is doing. General-population, time-activity data cannot be used for estimating exposures of deployed troops, only data specific to deployed personnel can yield accurate estimates of exposures.
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From page 65... ...
A wristwatch style GPS, for example, combined with a miniaturized data logger, would provide activity and location information that could be used to prevent acute exposures, as well as to estimate long-term exposure. The most promising automated approach for obtaining data for estimating long-term exposures appears to be a modified TIME device or similar data logger combined with GPS.
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These two changes will require that DoD take the following steps: · Develop and procure the technical means of assessing potential and actual exposures (e.g., real-time, field-usable devices for detecting biological agents and improved devices for detecting chemical agents)
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From page 67... ...
Recommendation: The Department of Defense should develop and field improved meteorological measuring and archiving systems to provide finer data grids of wind, temperature, and atmospheric stability in the theater of operations. These data will be necessary for improved transport modeling and for afteraction analyses of data on the movements of chemical and biological "clouds." Recommendation: The Department of Defense should support research to clarify how chemical and biological processes affect the rate of transformation of agents in different environmental media under a variety of conditions.
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From page 68... ...
To help accomplish this, location data and agent-concentration data that pertain to individuals or small units should be analyzed thoroughly, using statistical methods where applicable. Recommendation: The Department of Defense should study the ramifications of establishing a national chemical and biological hazardous agent data center.
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