“After querying all pilots across the DOD, for all-cause morbidity and mortality, I found a stunning increase in the number of reportable events, spiking from an average of 226 reportable events a year (2016-2019) to 4,059 reports in 2022,” she explained. A DOD reportable event is any patient safety event resulting in death, permanent harm, or severe temporary harm—and all require a comprehensive systematic analysis and a follow-on corrective action implementation plan report. “The point is there is a statistically significant increase in death, permanent harm, or severe temporary harm in young healthy fit pilots,” she continued.

Such injuries were more obviously shown in this population. Because aviation pilots are required to have a superior level of health and fitness, and their health conditions are under more strict monitoring, according to Long. What spurred Long on to pull this second round of data was when she learned the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had quietly made changes to the acceptable parameters of PR intervals (representative of the first part of a heartbeat, measured in seconds or milliseconds) on electrocardiograms of pilots.

The FAA didn’t respond with research and data to support their decision, according to Long. Those actions led to the press release dated Jan. 27, 2023 from Johnson in a letter to the FAA, where he stated the following details: “Based on data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, the whistleblower [Theresa Long] reported that the total number of disease and injuries [reportable events] in pilots across the DOD was 265 in 2016, 252 in 2017, 164 in 2018, 223 in 2019, 2,194 in 2020, 2,861 in 2021, and 4,059 in 2022.” via @planettoday #PlanetToday: https://www.planet-today.com/2023/02/recent-data-shows-stunning-increase-in.html