The Department of Veterans Affairs plans a major revamp of its eight-year-old burn pit registry following a new report criticizing it as unwieldy for veterans and useless to researchers.
The report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, released in mid-October, also said the VA is falling behind in its pledge to give medical exams to veterans who do manage to navigate the online Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry.
“There are major design and data-quality difficulties in the registry that can’t be overcome,” Kristen Olson, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociology professor who was part of the National Academies evaluation team, said during an online video presentation last month.
The National Academies report echoes similar criticisms in a VA inspector general report last summer. It recommends that the VA better communicate with Gulf War and post-9/11 veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service while speeding up the free health exams they are entitled to as part of the survey process.
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Tens of thousands of Gulf War and post-9/11 veterans reported unusual cancers, respiratory problems and other unexplained maladies in the years after their deployments they believed were linked to burn pits — just as an earlier generation of veterans have linked health issues to exposure to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam.
In years past, the difficulty in proving a direct link between today’s illness and yesterday’s toxic exposure has often put the VA directly at odds with the veterans it serves.
The dynamic has shifted dramatically in the last several years, though, as Congress has passed at least 30 laws addressing veterans and toxic exposure. The legislative wave culminated last summer with the bipartisan passage of the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, billed as the largest health care and benefit expansion in VA history.
The law adds more than 20 health conditions the VA must presume are connected to a veteran’s military service, dating back to the Vietnam War. And it requires the VA to offer a toxic exposure screening to every veteran enrolled in VA health care.
The 2013 law establishing the burn pit registry started the legislative surge, following years of concern over the use of open burn pits to dispose of trash at military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan — a nearly universal practice between 2002 and 2010, until the Defense Department phased them out. At least 270 operated at bases in southwest Asia, according to the National Academies report.
The registry allowed post-9/11 veterans to log in and answer questions about their deployment history and possible exposure to toxic smoke or other substances. They could also arrange for a free VA health exam.
In addition, the registry included veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, many of whom suffered toxic exposures to the smoke from burning Kuwaiti oil wells.
About 317,000 of 3.7 million eligible veterans had completed the registry’s survey since it went live in June 2014, Olson said. About half requested free health evaluations, but so far only about 30,000 have received them.
Those veterans collectively spent 200,000 hours filling out the survey, which included 140 questions. That doesn’t count an add-on questionnaire about individual deployments.
Another 130,000 veterans started the survey but didn’t complete it.
“There are a lot of individuals who were obviously motivated to take the survey but found it so daunting they didn’t complete the process,” said David Savitz, a Brown University professor of epidemiology who chaired the review committee. “There will be more completers…
Read More: VA studying revamp of ‘cumbersome’ Iraq-Afghanistan burn-pit registry