Tainted Drinking Water Beyond Camp Lejeune

It’s finally here: eight conditions have been added to the Department of Veterans Affairs list of presumptive illnesses caused by tainted drinking water at Camp Lejeune.

While the VA has been treating 15 illnesses, there were no benefits attached. Now it will provide disability benefits for: adult leukemia, aplastic anemia and other myelodysplastic syndromes, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, multiple

myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease. Dates of service are Aug. 1, 1953 to Dec. 31, 1987, for a minimum of 30 days.

Yes, this is great news. Yes, this means ill veterans will get the benefits they deserve. And yes … this is all so very late.

Remember years ago when Colorado Sen. Kay Hagen shredded The National Research Council and pointed out all the research the NRC ignored? Remember all the little kids who came down with leukemia, and the federal study that showed twice the rate of birth defects at Camp Lejeune? And remember the shock when 700,000 lost documents were suddenly found? Remember when it was revealed that dry-cleaning fluid was in the drinking water at Tarawa from 1957 to 1985?

We can’t forget just because the benefits have kicked in.

Why? Because in 1977, a civilian contractor discovered that TCE was present in the drinking water at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire. The base closed in 1991 and turned into Pease International Tradeport. In 2015 the EPA jumped in and found perfluorinated compounds, an ingredient in firefighting foam, and others. The state of New Hampshire started testing people, and based on results, it’s changed the initial health advisory (short-term drinking water exposure) to a lifetime health advisory level.

For more information on not only Pease, but hundreds of other bases, Google “Pease Air Force Base water.”