Medical surveillance and other strategies to protect the health of deployed U.S. forces: revisiting after 10 years

Following the first Gulf War (Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, 1990-1991), medically unexplained symptoms and illnesses reported by many returning veterans proved frustrating to veterans, care providers, and military planners. The Department of Defense (DoD) sought an independent, proactive effort to learn from the lessons of the Gulf War and other deployments and the development of a strategy to better protect the health of the troops. DoD engaged the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to provide input in four areas: assessment of health risks during deployments; technologies and methods for detection and tracking of exposures; physical protection and decontamination; and medical protection, health consequences and treatment, and medical record keeping. In a third year, a committee emphasized and extended the recommendations from the four interim reports to describe a long-term strategy for health protection. This article notes salient recommendations from the report on medical protection and record keeping and from the final report that still bear emphasis a decade after the reports were published.