Enhancing the Department of Defense's Capability to Identify Environmental Exposures Into the 21st Century

Military service members come in contact with a wide range of hazardous substances especially during deployment. The identification of service member's with potential exposures to infectious diseases and environmental toxic substances has been a problem for the U.S. military almost since the formation of the services and continues to be an issue today. In June and July of 2013, the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center sponsored two meetings to address the need by the Department of Defense to perform retrospective exposure analysis that would support military force health protection efforts. The first meeting included medical professionals who were familiar with health problems that followed potential environmental or infectious disease exposures but that the military health system was unprepared to address. The second group was composed of technical experts who were asked to suggest potential material and nonmaterial solutions to address the needs of the military public health community. This supplement to Military Medicine includes the outcome of these two meetings, descriptions of some of the Department of Defense biorepositories including the large serum repository housed at Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and discussion of additional topics related to the establishment and use of biorepositories that would support public health practice in the 21st century.