This story, part of a series of reporting projects by Military.com on service member and veteran health, was supported by the Pulitzer Center. You can read our first story on missileer cancer concerns here and our second story on maintainers’ health worries here.
A new independent research report examining non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases among service members who worked with nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana suggests that it’s very unlikely that the high rates of blood cancer would have occurred by chance.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the unpublished report, analyzed data provided by the Torchlight Initiative, a grassroots group of current and former missileers who have created a cancer registry for those who worked on intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. The report’s findings, first provided to Military.com, showed that “the probability of 18 missileers within the study population being diagnosed with [non-Hodgkin lymphoma] is 2.1 in 1,000 trillion or extremely unlikely to be due to chance,” the Torchlight Initiative said in a statement.
“This analysis underscored the exceptionally low likelihood of such events occurring purely by chance, suggesting potential underlying risk factors or exposures unique to this population,” the findings of the research paper, shared by Torchlight on Monday, stated.
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