Veterans call for improved military records.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: Up front: news, trends & analysis -

Some U.S. veterans and officials have charged the military with not keeping good medical records on deployed troops, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Accurate files that track the vaccines and treatments soldiers receive and where or when they may have been exposed to biological agents in the field are critical to veterans: The information is vital in helping to diagnose, treat, and identify the cause of illnesses they may develop years later, and it also helps qualify them for veteran's benefits.

The U.S. Congress passed a law in 1997 requiring the Pentagon to better monitor the health of wartime troops, but lawmakers did not set a deadline for implementing the new measures. The law mandates medical exams of troops before and after deployment, immunizations, and blood tests. Records of these medical tests are then supposed to be entered into a centralized data bank that can be easily accessed, the Wall Street Journal said. The law also requires the creation of a system to track individual service members as they move through a theater of operations, so the military can later reconstruct what agents soldiers may have been exposed to.

But the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigatory branch of Congress, estimated that the tracking system will not be fully implemented until 2007 or later. The GAO also found...