§1173 Formal Evaluation of Recommendations

Summary

The Secretary must set up a formal process to review each Working Group recommendation. Each review must look at scientific research (human, animal, toxicology, and study methods), claims information (claim rate, grant rate, and how common service connections are), and other important factors like how disabling or deadly the illness is, how good the information is, how long it would take to get more evidence, whether the illness is related to combat or deployment, how common the effect is, and any time window for symptoms to show up. Each review must follow scientific and data integrity and must not hide or twist findings. The review must decide how likely a link is between the toxic exposure and an illness while serving on active military, naval, air, or space service, using four categories: “sufficient” (enough evidence to say a link exists), “equipoise and above” (link is at least as likely as not), “below equipoise” (not enough to say it’s at least as likely as not), and “against” (evidence points to no link). The part of the Department doing the review must give a recommendation on creating or changing a presumption that the illness was caused by the exposure within 120 days after the review starts.