A C-17 from Air Mobility Command’s 437th Airlift Wing at Charleston AFB, S.C., delivered 30,000 H1N1 personal flu prevention kits to six South American countries in early May. The US Southern Command-sponsored program was a preventive measure intended to enable first-responders to distribute the kits as needed in Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua in the event the so-called Swine Flu broke out in those countries and to help contain the H1N1 virus which had spread across more than 30 countries. SOUTHCOM asked US Transportation Command for assistance and AMC’s 618th Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott AFB, Ill., coordinated the mission, which took the Charleston crew about 36 hours to complete. (618th TACC report by 1st Lt. Justin Brockhoff; USSOUTCOM release)
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.