Recognition Overdue: Military Health Records and Mortality of Norwegian Opération des Nations Unies au Congo Veterans...

As part of a Norwegian Ministry of Defence initiative, we examined the health records and mortality of veterans who served in Opération des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) from 1960 to 1964.

We manually searched personnel folders of ONUC veterans located in the National Archives in Oslo. After transcription and quality checks of the data, we employed descriptive statistics to examine the health records assessed before and after ONUC. We linked information from 640 veterans identified in the Norwegian National Population Register to the Causes of Death Registries to analyze their mortality. Standardized Mortality Ratios (SMRs) were calculated to compare the observed number of deaths among veterans to the expected deaths among all Norwegian men. Poisson regression analysis was used to compare mortality rates across different operation-related factors and expressed as relative risk.

The average birth year of ONUC veterans was 1931 and the average deployment year was 1962, with deployment typically lasting 6 months. Most veterans served in the Air Force (59.4%). Their health profiles remained so following the operation and over the years. The SMR for all-cause mortality was 0.83 (95% CI: 0.75-0.90), indicating lower mortality than the general male population. There was no elevated SMR for external causes (SMR: 0.78, 95% CI: 0.50-1.15). We did not find any operation-related factors that were associated with mortality.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first epidemiological study using data from UN operations prior to 1978. While we experienced challenges in digitizing preserved paper-based health records for Norwegian ONUC veterans, we found that they generally had good health and lower mortality, suggesting a "healthy soldier effect." Systematic follow-up for veterans is needed in order to preserve health data for future research and veteran welfare.