The Air Force is continuing its missile community cancer study and discussed the current process during a Dec. 1 media call that The Electric was invited to join.

Col. Greg Coleman, command surgeon for Air Force Global Strike Command, said that the study has two focuses, the epidemiology study and an environmental assessment.

The U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine is conducting three seasonal rounds of environmental sampling. The agency completed the first round over the summer, taking about 2,000 samples at the three missile bases to assess air, water, soil, radon and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

The three missile bases are Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Minot in North Dakota and F.E. Warren in Wyoming.

All 90 of the PCB air samples were non-detected.

PCB cleanup at Malmstrom continuing

The team found four of the 900 PCB surface at 0.4 percent above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s mitigation standards, two each at Malmstrom and Minot, according to Air Force Global Strike Command.

All four of those sites were immediately closed and a “multidisciplinary team of experts was gathered to include medical, EPA, engineers, etc. to develop and institute clean-up and mitigation procedures and retesting. Mitigation efforts continue to ensure we keep our airmen and guardians safe. At least one of these three locations has been cleaned/remediated and is now back in full operations,” Coleman said during the media call.

Coleman said that all air, drinking water, and soil sampling results are below established standards or below the laboratory limit of detection.

Air Force continuing mitigation, PCBs found at another missile site

The Air Force crews are still analyzing the radon tests results and those results will be release in the near future, he said.

The second round of sampling is underway and a third round is planned in the spring, the officials said.

The epidemiology study is reviewing the incidence of cancer cases in missileers and related career fields and comparing them to other military members and also to the general U.S. population. To do so, the Air Force teams are comparing data using a number of large databases from the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, as well as civilian databases. The team has partnered or is in communication with the the VA and the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health to get access to those data sets, Coleman said.

AFGSC orders cleanup after PCBs found at two missile launch facilities

Col. Tory Woodard, USAFSAM commander, said that his agency has about 50 people working on the study.

“This is very personal to us,” he said.

One of his team members’ father was a retired missile maintainer and had grown up on some of the missile bases.

“And so, we took this to heart immediately. And so, we are fully dedicated to looking into this to maintain the safety of our operations and our people,” Woodard said.

He said that at the base level, they’ve collected and analyzed about 2,000 samples per base. Those have been analyzed by USAFSAM, DOD and other national certified laboratories.

Air Force finds no specific cancer-causing factors in missileer study so far

Woodard said they spent about a day at each site and about two weeks at each base for each round of sampling.

He said they ship pallets of supplies to the bases before they arrive and bring them back in four to five large coolers.

Woodard said that the logistics of the testing is going to cost about $2.6 million.

He said they’re doing the environmental testing seasonally to capture seasonal variations that may occur at each base due to weather conditions, water tables and agricultural industrial impacts in the area.

So far, they’ve collected about 90 air samples, about 900 swipe samples for PCBs; about 1,350 drinking water samples, about 270 soil samples and about 630 air samples, Woodard said.

He said they’re checking soil samples to make sure there’s nothing there from pesticides or anything that may remain and get sucked into the air vents. They’re also looking at the overall base environmental conditions to include local agriculture and industry since many missile facilities are located near farmland or land not controlled by DOD.

Air Force team visits Malmstrom to begin missileer cancer study

Col. Joanna Rentes, chair of the occupational and environmental health department, said that they’re looking at historical data and working with the system program office for historical documents to get a sense of past environmental conditions at the missile sites.

Woodard said that the second round of sampling has been completed and teams returned just before Thanksgiving. Those results are now being analyzed and the results will be released in the future.

The third round of sampling is scheduled for the spring.

The PCB cleanup process is a difficult process, Coleman said.

Daines, Tester visit local military bases; discuss Sentinel, Grey Wolf, cancer study

Col. Dan Voorhies, of 20th Air Force Logistics Directorate, said that they developed the cleanup phase in cooperation with the system program office at Hill Air Force Base and other agencies. The process involved scrubbing and removing the PCBs, wipe surfaces down with other chemicals and taking those to the base civil engineering units and their HAZMAT programs for disposal. The sites were then retested and one has returned to alert at Malmstrom, Voorhies said.

The epidemiologic study is a large multi-phase study pulling from multiple DOD, VA, national and state databases to include electronic medical records, cancer rates and cancer indexes and death indexes.

Since many of the databases aren’t owned by DOD, they have to make specific requests for data, which takes time, he said.

Construction on Sentinel project set to begin

Woodard said the study is looking at 14 common cancers, to include non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which was the concern that prompted the concern in January. He said the study includes the same 14 cancers that were included in the fighter aviator cancer study the Air Force previously conducted.

Woodard said that as they gather the information, it will be used to help determine what future steps might be needed.

But, he said, “it is very difficult to come to causation. There’s many military studies out there that have suggested that there’s higher rates of cancers within military populations, such as melanoma and others. But finding causation is difficult. But that doesn’t mean the information is not helpful to us.”

Woodard said they’ll share the information with the VA and the public.

“Even if we don’t get to causation, that information is useful to medical experts, and VA experts. It helps medical providers do risk assessments and decide how to treat their patients,” he said. It also helps the VA determine future benefits, “because if there’s a known cancer risk, whether we have causation or not, that is helpful for them to determine future tracking and other efforts.”

The Air Force officials said that they’re also capturing data from those who served in missile related fields and those who have retired and those who were stationed at sites that are no longer active.

Woodard said the 2001 study of the potential for cancer in Malmstrom missileers didn’t have access to as much data as the team has now. That study didn’t find an apparent connection between their work in the missile field and incidents of cancer.

Woodard said that since the concern was raised earlier this year, they’re doing the study now and have more data available than would have been available two decades ago.