An update on the discrepancy I mentioned yesterday between the number of spinal cord injured soldiers in a recent Presidential commission report (94) and a number I received in March 2006 (228) -- they are underreporting the number of injured veterans.
Your interpretation of the following may differ from mine, but here's how everything went down.
I called the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors and asked spokesperson Joann Donnellan what the inclusion criteria was for the report -- basically, what conditions had to be met for an injured soldier to be counted as a "wounded warrior."
Not knowing, she said she would call me back when she found out. True to her word, she called me back and let me speak with a person who was responsible for reviewing the data.
After I explained my concern with the numbers, the data reviewer said the numbers were drawn from Air Evac reports from "the theater" (Afghanistan and Iraq). I asked whether the data was available online so I could link it and the response was a negative.
She said that she couldn't explain the discrepancy without seeing the data that provided the 228 number, so I told her it was the number of veterans from Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) who had sustained spinal cord injuries whether "in the theater or not."
Her response was that the commission was charged with a specific task for this report, which involved only troops injured in Afghanistan or Iraq. (Sound familiar?)
She demurred when asked whether soldiers who weren't injured in OEF/OIF would benefit from these recommendations, but eventually relented and gave the generic answer that all soldiers will receive the same great care at the VA.
You may be wondering why this is appearing in Wired Science, which is a perfectly valid question. Here's my rationale: I think the undercount is politically motivated to hinder science.
Traditionally, the troops have approved of Bush's leadership. And the minority percentage of Americans who back the president see him as a strong supporter of the troops. They might also know that he has held back funding for medical research, but that doesn't really bother them -- for now.
That may change if they knew the real number of "wounded warriors" -- the ones Bush's funding limitations on medical research hurt.
The commission was created by Bush with a specific goal -- to determine the number of soldiers injured in OEF/OIF while "in the theater". The commission did the job it was assigned and their recommendations are generally good, but I fear the "in the theater" restriction makes the data unreliable.
Think about it: the data is gathered from Air Evac reports, which document soldiers flown from Iraq or Afghanistan to a hospital on their way back home. While the number of spinal cord injuries may be accurate under the given restrictions, the number of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) may be vastly underreported. (The report doesn't list the number of PTSD sufferers, but does say 2,726 soldiers suffered TBIs.)
Some TBI and PTSD sufferers may go unnoticed initially, only to be picked up after the soldier leaves the military theater and returns to the US -- these late detections are not counted in the report, because the diagnosis wouldn't be listed on the Air Evac reports.
If Bush's supporters were aware of the true number of lives he has ruined, they'd be more likely to say: "Hey, fund the research so that my [son/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister] can be themselves again!"
A tiny, optimistic, hopeful part of me doubts this political motivation -- but it's getting difficult to believe anything else.
Bush and science will never mix -- even if his recalcitrance destroys the lives of soldiers.
