https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/06/07/air-force-missileers-get-new-workplace-inspections-health-tracking-amid-ongoing-cancer-cluster-study.html
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Military.com | By Thomas Novelly
Published June 07, 2024 at 5:22pm ET
Missileers will soon have workplace exposures and hazards added to their records, and there will be more inspections of the underground bunkers where they work, a major reform as the service continues to investigate growing cancer concerns within the career field.
During a Thursday town hall hosted by Air Force Global Strike Command, which was open to the public, service officials announced that, by December, missileers will have their information submitted to the Defense Occupational and Environmental Health Readiness System, or DOEHRS -- a Pentagon database for reporting occupational and exposure hazards while on the job.
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"We're in the process of adding missileers to this system (DOEHRS)," Lt. Col. John Severns, a spokesperson for Air Force Global Strike Command, said Friday. "This info from DOEHRS flows into the recently developed Individual Longitudinal Exposure Record (ILER), a system that compiles occupational and environmental health data throughout a person's career."
DOEHRS, a system that has tracked Air Force records since 2010, will allow any of those workplace or environmental incidents to be accessed by Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs medical staff. It will be available for individuals to access by 2025, Severns said.
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Launch control centers will now undergo similar workplace investigations as those done at the launch facilities where maintainers work.
"So, while our maintainers may have had operational site visits, we did not perform those visits with the missile officers, and that will change going forward," Col. Tory Woodard, the commander of the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, said during the town hall. "Our efforts will standardize occupational health reporting and analysis going forward. Overall, our goal is to make sure we are protecting today's airmen."
Severns said those site visits should be completed by December.
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Early results indicate some elevated cancer levels, but Air Force Global Strike Command still needs data from Department of Veterans Affairs medical records, the DoD cancer registry, and the VA cancer registry for a more complete picture.
Those next findings should be shared in September, as officials probe records dating back to the mid- to late-1970s and, eventually, state and national cancer data, too.
Dozens of former missileers, maintainers and family members of deceased service members joined Thursday's town hall to ask about the status of the study, raise concerns over whether they were exposed, and detail their fight for VA benefits.
