WASHINGTON (NEWSnet/AP) — The Air Force is expanding its study of whether service members who worked with nuclear missiles have had unusually high rates of cancer after it concluded more information is needed.

The Air Force won’t make its initial findings of cancer numbers public for a month or so, but released its initial assessment Monday.

“We’ve determined that additional study is warranted,” said Lt. Col. Keith Beam, one of the Air Force medical officers who updated reporters on the service’s missile community cancer review.

The findings are part of a sweeping review undertaken by the Air Force earlier this year to determine if missileers — the launch officers who worked underground to operate the nation’s silo-launched nuclear missiles — were exposed to unsafe contaminants. The review began after scores of those current or former missile launch officers came forward this year to report they have been diagnosed with cancer.

For their research, medical teams went out to each nuclear missile base to conduct thousands of tests of the air, water, soil and surface areas inside and around each of its three nuclear missile bases; Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

The expanded Air Force study will look not just at the missileers but at the whole missile community, to include all who supported the ICBM mission.

While data may show that the air, water and soil are safe now, it still raises questions as to what earlier missile launch officers may have been exposed to in the past. The silos and underground control capsules were dug during the 1960s and much of that infrastructure hasn’t been updated since.

“We can’t go back and test to fully quantify what was there in the ‘90s or 2000s, or even the ’50s and ‘60s,” said Col. Tory Woodard, commander of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. “But we can use this data to help us inform what those risks might have been.”

In the meantime, Air Force is expanding its review of medical records to try to account for as many service members as possible. The initial dataset only goes back to 2001, when DOD began using electronic medical records. The additional people would be those who worked with military nuclear missiles going back to 1976, looking into Department of Veterans Affairs data and state cancer registries.

Earlier generations of missile launch officers did raise concerns about illnesses among their community. But the issue received significantly more attention this year as scores of current or former officers or their surviving family members joined forces and went public with self-reported data of their cancers.

For example, 41 launch officers self-reported a diagnoses of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. Those families have formed an organization, called the Torchlight Initiative, to bring awareness to the issue. The number of self-reported NHL cases is striking because the community of missile launch officers is very small.

But also these days, a number of those diagnosed officers are still serving, and many of the officers leading the missile community have connections to former missileers who have been diagnosed with or have died of cancer.

“I personally know a number of the folks who are non-Hodgkin lymphoma survivors, so a lot of empathy and a lot of desire to understand better,” said Col. Barry Little, commander of the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base. “We’re leaving no stone unturned.”

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