Report

In response to a request by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the IOM established a committee to oversee the development and evaluation of a model of wartime herbicide exposure for use in studies of Vietnam veterans. That committee provided scientific advice to a team of researchers from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (Jeanne Mager Stellman, PhD, Principal Investigator), who were contracted to construct the model.

In this final report, the committee concludes, on the basis of its review of the contractor's final report and all previous work, that the Columbia University researchers have satisfactorily completed the research project as defined in their proposal and modified in consultation with the committee. It also affirms all the findings and conclusions reached in its own Interim Report (IOM, 2003). The Interim report concluded that a valid exposure reconstruction model for wartime herbicide exposures of US veterans of Vietnam is feasible and therefore recommended that the Department of Veterans Affairs and other government agencies facilitate additional epidemiologic studies of veterans by non-governmental organizations and independent researchers.