thedrifter
06-13-09, 06:21 AM
Marines, families warned of water contamination
Camp Lejeune » Personnel on base between 1957 and 1987 may have been exposed to tainted water.
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 06/12/2009 04:11:46 PM MDT
Freshly back from Vietnam in 1967, Harry Hughes knew that military service could be dangerous and deadly. But more than 40 years later, Hughes is worried that untold thousands of Marine Corps veterans, like himself, might still be paying for their service with their lives.
The Corps is encouraging all those who lived or worked at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina before 1987 to register to receive information about contamination at the base, where potentially dangerous concentrations of several industrial chemicals are known to have contaminated the water supply. Among them: degreasing agents known as trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene,
"There potentially was a huge number of people exposed," said Hughes, a bio-psychiatrist who teaches at Salt Lake Community College. "Not just Marines, but their spouses and families."
Although the Marine Corps has known since the early 1980s of the contamination and permanently closed the wells supplying the base with water in 1987, relatively little is known about the health effects suffered by those who lived or worked on the base. One group, which calls itself, "The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten" has chronicled the health problems of more than 300 Camp Lejeune veterans at its Web site: www.tftptf.com. The reports include various forms of cancer, including leukemia, birth problems, skin rashes, kidney disease and neurological disorders.
The U.S. Veterans Administration will not treat any of those maladies as "service connected," unless it is can be proven that the medical problems are indeed connected to the consumption of the tainted water.
On Saturday, a committee of the National Academies' National Research Council will report on its review on the associations between adverse health effects and historical data on prenatal, childhood and adult exposures to contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune.
But The Forgotten group co-founder Jerry Ensminger -- a retired master sergeant whose daughter, born at Camp Lejeune in 1976, died of leukemia at the age of nine -- said he's not confident that the council review will give a full picture of the problems. He wants a more comprehensive scientific study.
"They already did the poisoning," he said. "You might as well use us as a laboratory, do the studies and increase the body of scientific knowledge of what this stuff does."
His group is encouraging former Camp Lejeune Marines and their families to register with the Department of the Navy, which is building a registry of people who may have consumed the Camp Lejeune drinking water between 1957 and 1987.
Hughes said he registered this week. For the purposes of scientific study, he noted, the more people who come forward the better.
mlaplante@sltrib.com blogs.sltrib.com/military
Ellie
Camp Lejeune » Personnel on base between 1957 and 1987 may have been exposed to tainted water.
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 06/12/2009 04:11:46 PM MDT
Freshly back from Vietnam in 1967, Harry Hughes knew that military service could be dangerous and deadly. But more than 40 years later, Hughes is worried that untold thousands of Marine Corps veterans, like himself, might still be paying for their service with their lives.
The Corps is encouraging all those who lived or worked at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina before 1987 to register to receive information about contamination at the base, where potentially dangerous concentrations of several industrial chemicals are known to have contaminated the water supply. Among them: degreasing agents known as trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene,
"There potentially was a huge number of people exposed," said Hughes, a bio-psychiatrist who teaches at Salt Lake Community College. "Not just Marines, but their spouses and families."
Although the Marine Corps has known since the early 1980s of the contamination and permanently closed the wells supplying the base with water in 1987, relatively little is known about the health effects suffered by those who lived or worked on the base. One group, which calls itself, "The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten" has chronicled the health problems of more than 300 Camp Lejeune veterans at its Web site: www.tftptf.com. The reports include various forms of cancer, including leukemia, birth problems, skin rashes, kidney disease and neurological disorders.
The U.S. Veterans Administration will not treat any of those maladies as "service connected," unless it is can be proven that the medical problems are indeed connected to the consumption of the tainted water.
On Saturday, a committee of the National Academies' National Research Council will report on its review on the associations between adverse health effects and historical data on prenatal, childhood and adult exposures to contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune.
But The Forgotten group co-founder Jerry Ensminger -- a retired master sergeant whose daughter, born at Camp Lejeune in 1976, died of leukemia at the age of nine -- said he's not confident that the council review will give a full picture of the problems. He wants a more comprehensive scientific study.
"They already did the poisoning," he said. "You might as well use us as a laboratory, do the studies and increase the body of scientific knowledge of what this stuff does."
His group is encouraging former Camp Lejeune Marines and their families to register with the Department of the Navy, which is building a registry of people who may have consumed the Camp Lejeune drinking water between 1957 and 1987.
Hughes said he registered this week. For the purposes of scientific study, he noted, the more people who come forward the better.
mlaplante@sltrib.com blogs.sltrib.com/military
Ellie