Air Force to do full study of cancer rates

WASHINGTON — The Air Force is expanding its study of whether service members who worked with nuclear missiles have had unusually high rates of cancer, after a preliminary review determined that a deeper examination is needed.

The initial study was launched in response to reports that many who served are now ill. The Air Force isn’t making its initial findings of cancer numbers public for a month or so, but released its initial assessment Monday that more review is necessary.

“We’ve determined that additional study is warranted” based on preliminary analyses of the data, said Lt. Col. Keith Beam, one of several Air Force medical officers who updated reporters on the service’s missile community cancer review.

The findings are part of a sweeping review undertaken by the Air Force earlier this year to determine if missileers — the launch officers who worked underground to operate the nation’s silo-launched nuclear missiles — were exposed to unsafe contaminants. The review began after scores of those current or former missile launch officers came forward this year to report they have been diagnosed with cancer.

In response, medical teams went out to each nuclear missile base to conduct thousands of tests of the air, water, soil and surface areas inside and around each of its three nuclear missile bases; Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

The full Air Force study will look not just at the missileers but at the whole missile community, to include all who supported the ICBM mission.

At a briefing Friday with reporters to discuss its findings ahead of the release, the Air Force said none of the more than 2,000 samples of air, water and soil at either the Montana or Wyoming bases came back showing harmful levels of contamination. However, four locations in the underground launch control capsules where the missileers worked had unsafe levels of PCBs. The service is still waiting on results from the North Dakota base.

PCBs are oily or waxy substances that have been identified as a likely carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But while that data may show that the air, water and soil are safe now, it still raises questions as to what earlier missile launch officers may have breathed in or been exposed to in the past. The silos and underground control capsules were dug during the 1960s, and much of that infrastructure hasn’t been updated since.

“We can’t go back and test to fully quantify what was there in the ’90s or 2000s, or even the ’50s and ’60s,” said Col. Tory Woodard, commander of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. “But we can use this data to help us inform what those risks might have been.”

Woodard said the sampling and further data review will help the Air Force “build a risk profile of what past members may have been exposed to.”

To help with that, the Air Force is expanding its review of medical records to try to account for as many service members as possible. The initial dataset only goes back to 2001, when DOD began using electronic medical records. But the group they hope to capture includes any personnel who worked with military nuclear missiles going back to 1976, and will add Department of Veterans Affairs data and state cancer registries.

In all, the study hopes to capture data on all missile community members who served from 1976 to 2010.

The Air Force response is different this time from what it has been in the past, when earlier generations of missile launch officers raised concerns about illnesses among their community. For years the missileers were told in multiple Air Force reviews that there was not cause for concern.

But the issue received significantly more attention this year, as scores of current or former officers or their surviving family members went public with self-reported data of their cancers. In particular, 41 of those launch officers self-reported a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a blood cancer. Those families have formed an organization, called the Torchlight Initiative, to heighten awareness of the issue.

While the Air Force review is looking at a broader set of cancers, the number of self-reported non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cases is striking because the community of missile launch officers is very small. Nationwide rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are 18.7 per 100,000 people, according to the National Cancer Institute.

For comparison, there have only been about 21,000 who have served as missileers since the 1960s, according to the Torchlight Initiative. The entire missile community population — to include maintainers to fix the warheads and security forces who patrolled the sites — is likely about 84,000, the Air Force said.