Health Registries Who Knew

The post deployment clinics of the active services and the VAMCs have registry exams and questionaires. Too many of troops are not aware they exist or know how this data can work in our favor years later. The VAMCs have Environmental Health coordinations ( former known as Agent Orange Coordinators), who are tasked to invite the troop/veteran/patient to complete the required documentation. Trying to find these individuals is difficult, usual because these staffer have many other jobs to handle. Over worked and under loved, it seems to me. Jagmedic said

Ten years and 100,000 participants later: occupational and other factors influencing participation in US Gulf War health registries.

For more than a decade after the Gulf War, there has been concern that wartime exposures have resulted in significant morbidity among Gulf War veterans. After the end of the war, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) initiated health registries to provide systematic clinical evaluations of Gulf War veterans who chose to participate.

By September 1999, there were 32,876 participants in the DoD Comprehensive Clinical Evaluation Program and 70,385 participants in the VA Gulf War Registry Health Examination Program. We identified demographic and military service factors, as well aspotential war-related exposures associated with subsequent registry participation after 10 years of observation.

Veterans potentially exposed to oil well fire smoke, those near Khamisiyah, Reserve and National Guard, Army veterans, and veterans in the theater of operations during intense combat periods were most likely to elect to participate in a registry. These findings support the hypothesis that certain occupational factors and wartime exposures may influence subsequent health care-seeking behavior.
PMID: 12185797 [PubMed - in process]
Department of Defense Center for Deployment Health Research, Naval Health Research Center, PO Box 85122, San Diego, CA 92186-5122, USA.