Study finds higher cancer rates among U.S. military airmen and ground crews | Hacker News Reader

Study finds higher cancer rates among U.S. military airmen and ground crews

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44 pointstzhenghao15 comments

Sometimes you look at the world a different way.

It's a trope in fantasy books that elves are sensitive to iron, and humans can easily defeat them by using "cold iron" or steel weapons and armour.

So... what is humanity's "cold iron"?

Two that come to mind are beryllium and cadmium, both used almost nowhere in bulk outside of... military aerospace... because they're poisonous to humans.

Beryllium is the ultimate aerospace engineering metal. Extremely light, very strong, and doesn't expand much when heated. It's commonly used in missiles and the like.

Cadmium is the ultimate anti-corrosion coating because it's so soft that it reflows to cover microscopic cracks. That gold colour you see on the undercarriage and landing gear of some military aircraft is cadmium. Its use is banned for most civilian purposes, but special dispensation is available for military use. It's just that good, which justifies lightly poisoning a few airmen.

>It's just that good, which justifies lightly poisoning a few airmen.

If you're in the business of killing people, are you really surprised your company doesn't value your life?

The logic is that if a bomber carrying a nuclear payload crashes because of corrosion, then that would be a lot more harmful than whatever danger the cadmium poses.

Unfortunately cadmium is used in bulk in the making of much of the dark chocolate sold in the USA. It's ironic because dark chocolate is often marketed has having health benefits.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

> The researchers found that cacao plants take up cadmium from the soil, with the metal accumulating in cacao beans as the tree grows. That’s similar to how heavy metals contaminate some other foods.

It's not the machinery that's adding the heavy metals, it's either the plants concentrating it from the soil, or air pollution settling on the beans.

What's scary is that my favourite brand of dark chocolate is in the danger zone for cadmium!

A coworker pointed out to me that all the crew chiefs in his (Marine Corps) aviation unit only had daughters.

They worked on aircraft with radioactive emitters designed to detect bullet holes in the rotors without electronics going through a rotating joint.

“ The Pentagon took pains to point out that the new study “does not imply that military service in air crew or ground crew occupations causes cancer, because there are multiple potential confounding factors that could not be controlled for in this analysis,” such as family histories of cancer, smoking behavior or alcohol use.”

so they didn’t control for the three biggest contributors to cancer risk - how is this useful? It’s like finding that strippers have higher risk of cancer than “the general population”, and implying that taking your clothes off is a risk factor for cancer…

Doing this kind of meaningless study doesn’t help anyone, including the service members and their families - if, for example, the major risk comes from higher rates of smoking among the military, then let’s focus on reducing that risk factor: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8489722/

Even if they didn’t or couldn’t control for certain factors it doesn’t mean that the study is useless.

Familial history is likely not a good excuse since there would be a very broad population even in a single branch.

Behavioral factors are still very much relevant because you can use it for a public health policy, if smoking and drinking is worse in the military than in the general population then it’s something that you can definitely try to address.

Another factor that can play here is that servicemen have probably better healthcare than the average population especially when it comes to preventative healthcare and checkups.

So whilst this study isn’t enough to identify causation it’s enough for correlation which is quite often as important when it comes to public health policies.

And, in any case, publishing an interesting but incomplete finding gives others the chance to pick up where this leaves off.

>Another factor that can play here is that servicemen have probably better healthcare than the average population especially when it comes to preventative healthcare and checkups.

Assuming that it is somewhat similar to the navy, the catastrophic and chronic stuff is very well covered (and no cost), but general screenings and physicals are no-value-add with a significant component of psychological harm.

it’s funny you use the word “excuse” rather than “reason” or “cause” - it’s almost like you’ve already drawn a conclusion in the absence of any actual data…

The point is there is no excuse NOT to consider those important factors - they are part of every annual physical and certainly part of the extensive screening done during enlistment. So you’d only ignore them if you’re trying to create a particular narrative, IMO

Research about military offspring ratio seems to have focused on various environmental and occupational exposures, including:

- radiation

- boron

- g-forces

- polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)

- dioxins

- pesticides

- lead, and other metals.

(1961) Snyder Rg. - The sex ratio of offspring of pilots of high performance military aircraft.

"A statistically significant (.01>p>.001) preponderance of female offspring born when fathers flew fighter-type aircraft prior to conception was found. Of 94 children conceived and born under these conditions 59 were females giving a sex ratio males per 100 females of 59.3 as compared with the expected ratio of 105.37 obtained from registered births in the U.S. total population in 1950. It was also found that when fathers flew multiengined types of aircraft prior to conception they fathered 15 females and 25 males a sex ratio of 166.67. When fathers did not fly at all the results were 35 females and 53 males a sex ratio of 151.42. The sex ratio by parity was closer to expected. Normally the sex ratio shows a continuous drop at each succeeding pregnancy. Here when the fathers flew transport types of aircraft or did not fly at all prior to conception the same drop was apparent. However a significant reversal occurred when fathers flew fighters prior to conception of each child: the ratio successively increased with each succeeding birth."

Terrell et al. (2011) said: Snyder was the only researcher who used detailed military flight logs to calculate the number of flight hours for each pilot, and the only author to focus on flights during the critical window of spermatogenesis.

- (2009) Å. Irgens, L. Irgens. Male proportion in offspring of military air pilots in Norway

"The male proportion was 36.9%, the male proportion in the reference population was 51.4% with a relative risk 0.72 (95% CI 0.57–0.92). "

But there is also research countering this:

- (2019) Kaitlyn Huegel Mayer, Trimble L.B. Spitzer. Offspring gender rates in active duty fighter pilots and flight officers.

reports offspring ratios similar to general population.

Yet, there seems to be an association with more working hours:

- (2009) Rebecca Baczuk, Anthony Biascan, Erik T. Grossgold, Ari Isaacson, J. Spencer. Sex ratio shift in offspring of male fixed-wing naval aviation officers.

"Although the ratio of male offspring from all participants in our study, aircraft groups, and aircraft supergroups was not statistically significantly different from the general population, this study provides statistical support that there is a sex ratio shift among offspring of male aviation officers when they fly more hours during the 11th month before birth. Furthermore, for officers who fl y carrier-based aircraft, that shift is even more dramatic as they approach and exceed 50 hours per month. "

You might think about G-forces but there's also research about submariners:

- (2019) Kathleen E Kramer, S. Raiciulescu, C. Olsen, K. Hickey, M. Ottolini. Altered Sex Ratios in Offspring of U.S. Submariners Urban Legend or Fact - Do Submariners Have More Daughters?

"The submariners surveyed reported greater numbers of daughters than the general population, especially when on sea duty or in regular contact with submarines during shore duty. Further study should be done to confirm results and explore possible etiologies of differences in sex ratio."

We should also note (2011) Terrell states:

"There is some evidence that the endocrine disruptors, dioxin and PCBs, are associated with altered secondary sex ratio. Dioxin exposure is associated with a lower male:female sex ratio in offspring of exposed men, while PCB exposure is associated with a higher male:female sex ratio in offspring of exposed men."

Previous discussion on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225181

Jp6 is some nasty stuff.

JP-6 isn't used anymore, it was only ever used for the experimental supersonic mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie bomber, and when the bomber was cancelled, the specialty fuel was as well.

The number of people exposed to it is very very small.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com