Thank you for being one of the many MSMR readers in 2025. MSMR’s mission is to publish operationally relevant, timely, and descriptive epidemiological articles that provide accurate data on topics vital to the health, safety, and resilience of the U.S. Armed Forces. As a product of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Division (AFHSD), within the Public Health Directorate (PHD) of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), MSMR is a peer-reviewed journal published each month on health.mil that is also indexed on PubMed and archived on PubMed Central (PMC).
The MSMR role, supporting the combined missions of AFHSD, PHD, and DHA, remains vital. The need for appropriate database utilization, information synthesis, and methodologically valid analysis remains the ‘gold standard’ of epidemiological surveillance and medical knowledge development. MSMR continuously strives for timeliness with careful deliberation, relevance with objectivity, and scientific validity focused on force readiness, force health protection, and force resilience.
Although we publish MSMR for both warfighter readiness as well as military and civilian public health surveillance, planning, and response—with many individuals and organizations both within and outside DHA to thank—it is our readers such as you who are in our thoughts when we assemble, edit, and publish each issue. 2025 has truly been a high water mark for MSMR due to increased content, particularly in special topical issues, and significantly enhanced readership metrics.
MSMR published three special issues in 2025, which enhanced MSMR focus on unique military readiness and force health protection concerns. Our 30th anniversary issue in April featured 10 articles covering many operationally important topics including, but not limited to, historical highlights, influenza modeling, global pathogen surveillance, HIV testing, in addition to the annual malaria case update. In May, MSMR published a military women’s health and readiness issue, which also included 10 reports, covering a breadth of topics from infertility and contraception trends to military women’s health and readiness research and female warfighter performance in extreme environments.
MSMR’s third special issue, in September, presented our annual review of illnesses and injuries within the active, reserve, and Guard components of the U.S. Armed Forces in addition to its Military Health System (MHS) beneficiaries. The issue examined numbers and trends in hospitalization and ambulatory visits, deployment morbidity burdens, selected medical evacuations and telehealth usage by the active component members. Publishing morbidity burdens for the entire MHS in one issue provides our readers with a valuable reference document of recent case numbers and trends.
Rigorous data collection, exacting analysis, manuscript writing and review, and painstaking submission for publication is hard work, and we appreciate and heartily thank each author in 2025 for their scholarship and dedication. The MSMR editorial staff deeply appreciates the quality and operational value of every submission. Our manuscript submissions in 2025 increased by nearly two-thirds, and those increased submissions resulted in greater MSMR content, providing our readers with even more accurate, timely, and clear epidemiological reporting.
We also heartily thank our subject matter expert reviewers. Our external reviewers provide robust assessments and insightful comments informed by their professional knowledge and years of expertise that assist our authors’ refinement of their manuscripts. For each original manuscript submitted, our double-blind peer review process involves two independent subject matter experts who contribute clinical and professional perspectives, enhanced analyses, and additional editorial rigor that improves the quality of MSMR reporting.
MSMR began archiving on PMC in January 2024, enabling free, open, permanent access to our peer-reviewed content. Over the past two years, readership of MSMR content on PMC has steadily grown, expanding our impact within the international scientific community. The MSMR online ‘hit’ rate on PMC was 50% higher in 2025 compared to 2024.
Our reach and readership continue to increase as the appetite for high quality, evidence-based, military health-specific information continues to grow. The Department of War public health community is focused on collecting, publishing, and applying the increasing knowledge base to positively influence health awareness and outcomes. MSMR’s advances in 2025 are the result of hard work by the MSMR staff in concert with the excellent manuscripts submitted by public health investigators and researchers, not only from the various DHA organizations, but civilian and international contributors as well. MSMR staff works in collaboration with DHA PHD staff to more broadly share the findings that result from the substantial medical data available within DHA and the MHS.
Each MSMR issue comes together over the course of months, beginning with manuscript submission by our authors, comprehensive internal review by our editors, external review by external subject matter experts, painstaking responses and revisions by the authors, meticulous copy editing, and publishing on health.mil, indexing on PubMed, and archiving on PMC. We could not accomplish our mission to publish this operationally relevant journal without our authors, reviewers and, of course, our readers. Many thanks to you all!
Our plans for 2026 are robust. We will continue to increase our published content, and aim to publish earlier within the month, to increase the timeliness of our reporting. To return to my first Letter form the Editor’s Desk, published in January 2024, our mission and dedication remain firm and unchanged. I wrote then and reiterate, “In the most recent Armed Forces Health Surveillance Division (AFHSD) Annual Report, MSMR is referred to as the “premiere medical peer-reviewed journal published by the AFHSD and Defense Health Agency (DHA),” which provides “evidence-based estimates of the incidence, distribution, impact and trends of illness and injury among U.S. military service members and associated populations.” MSMR has a distinguished legacy of excellence and professional rigor. As we begin our 31st year, the MSMR staff is honored to pick up and carry that standard further. MSMR continues to be vigilant and undaunted by the continued high stakes role of public health but successes of 2025 position us well to continue to serve “those who serve” in 2026.
Very Respectfully,
Robert Johnson, MD, MPH, MBA
Col (ret) USAF
Editor-in-Chief
Medical Surveillance Monthly Report