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thedrifter
09-01-07, 10:11 AM
Awareness, but no answers

By Gareth McGrath
Staff Writer
gareth.mcgrath@starnewsonline.com


The scientific studies aren't finished yet, the conclusive evidence the former residents of Camp Lejeune crave still not there.

But Janet Inman of Wilmington, like many attendees, said the forum offered something as equally valuable.

"This makes people aware, and that's what important," she said.

Friday more than 150 people filled Kenan Auditorium on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington to hear about the potential health effects from water contamination at Camp Lejeune.

The event, sponsored by the Star-News and Wilmington public radio station WHQR-FM, was the first national conference on the issue.

From 1957 to 1987 up to 1 million Marines and their dependents drank, washed and swam in water used on the Onslow County Marine base that had two of its water systems contaminated with a slew of pollutants from leaky tanks, spills and even illegal dumping.

The Marine Corps, which declined to participate in the forum, has admitted to the presence of the cornucopia of dangerous chemicals in the water.

But the military is withholding judgment on whether it is responsible for any medical ailments until the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the environmental health arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, finishes a study on children born on the base.

That kind of answer, coupled with the insular nature of the military and government in general, hasn't instilled confidence in people.

People like Virginia Baysden, who worked on the base for 13 years - as did her sister, and her mother who died from a brain tumor.

"They don't think it was hereditary, that it was something that just happened," Baysden said of her mother's tumor. "But then this just happened, too, so what are we to think?"

Friday's panel of experts, including toxicologists, laid out what was in the water, the potential health impacts from exposure to the chemicals and when the contaminants were in the affected water systems.

But they admitted that individual family histories and variabilities in toxicity levels and exposure times can make determinations on specific health problems difficult.

More worrying to some former Camp Lejeune residents is that the problems appear to be jumping generations.

Jeff Byron, who lived on base from 1981 to 1985, has seen his two daughters suffer from a litany of health woes - an oral cleft birth defect, spinal disorder and a rare condition called aplastic anemia.

Now his grandchild is having some of the same problems.

"I have absolutely no doubt at all," Byron said when asked if he thought the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune played a role. "They'll say it's random. But I've lived with it for 25 years."

Janet Inman said she didn't go to Friday's forum just for herself.

"I came here for my daughter," she said. "I came here to listen and learn because I want health care for the children of people who lived there."

Inman's 7-year-old daughter has already had nine operations for melanoma, a serious form of skin cancer, that Inman has no doubt is related to her time living at Lejune.

"Everyone in my family has issues," she said, adding that she suffers from immune system issues. "And now we're seeing it getting passed on."

Several folks also mentioned their disappointment and anger that the federal government, and especially the Marines, would treat those who had signed up to protect this country so badly.

But perhaps former Marine Jerry Ensminger, a member of Friday's panel who believes the contaminated water led to the death of his daughter from leukemia in 1985, summed up the mood best.

"They certainly haven't lived up to their motto 'we take care of our own,'" he said of the Marine Corps.

Gareth McGrath: 343-2384

gareth.mcgrath@starnewsonline.com

Ellie