A Pentagon study has found high rates of cancer among military pilots and for the first time has also shown that ground crew in charge of refueling, maintaining and launching aircraft also have signs of falling ill with cancer.
Quoted from PBS News Hour – Pbs.org (19/3/2023), the data has long been sought by retired military aviators who have been sounding the ‘alarm’ for years about the number of air and ground crew members they know who have cancer.
They were told that previous military studies found they were at no greater risk than the general population in the United States. Overall, flight crew had a 24 percent higher rate of developing cancer.
In a year-long study of nearly 900,000 service members who flew or served on military aircraft between 1992 and 2017, the Pentagon found that flight crew members had an 87 percent higher rate of melanoma and a 39 percent higher rate of thyroid cancer, while men had an 87 percent higher rate of melanoma 39 percent higher. prostate cancer rates are 16 percent higher, and women have breast cancer rates 16 percent higher.
The study showed ground crew had a 19 percent higher rate of brain and nervous system cancer, a 15 percent higher rate of thyroid cancer and a 9 percent higher rate of kidney or kidney cancer, while women had a 7 percent higher rate of breast cancer. The overall rate for all types of cancer was 3 percent higher.
There's some good news to report as well. Both ground and air crew had significantly lower rates of lung cancer, and aircrew also had lower rates of bladder and colon cancer. The data compares service members to the general US population after adjusting for age, sex, and race.
The Pentagon said the new study was one of its largest and most comprehensive to date. An earlier study only looked at Air Force pilots and had found some higher cancer rates, while this one looked at all services and in air and ground crew.
The study was requested by Congress in the 2021 defense bill. Now that the higher levels were found, the Pentagon must conduct an even larger review to try to understand why military personnel get so much cancer.
Isolating potential causes of cancer is certainly difficult, and the Pentagon is careful to note that this study does not imply that military service in aircrew or ground crew jobs causes cancer, as there are many potential confounding factors that could not be controlled for in this analysis, such as family history, smoking or alcohol use.
The study found that when members of the military were diagnosed with cancer, they were more likely to survive than members of the general population, which the study found because they were diagnosed earlier with necessary routine medical exams and more likely to be in better health, possibly because their bodies are relatively fitter.
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