New report offers little help to vet who says, "All the evidence I submitted, the VA threw out."

NOTE from Larry Scott, VA Watchdog dot Org ... The legacy of contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune will be more ill and dead veterans, and family members.  Use our search engine for more about contamination at Camp Lejeune.

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Ill veterans push for answers on Lejeune contamination

By Bruce Henderson
McClatchy Newspapers

Kidney cancer, Mike Edwards says, came so close to killing him five years ago that he saw a stairway to heaven and smelled the brimstone of hell.

Now, Edwards and thousands of other veterans are caught in a kind of purgatory. They believe decades of drinking-water contamination at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base sickened them or their family members.

But they may never know the truth.

Federal officials acknowledge that, from the 1950s to 1985, up to 500,000 people at Lejeune might have been exposed to high doses of chemicals that probably cause cancer and other illnesses.

A new report offers little hope of answers. No amount of study, it said, is likely to conclusively prove the contamination made anybody sick.

So many people came and went from Lejeune over the years, said a June 13 report from the National Research Council, that it's unlikely many can be located. It's also hard to estimate the amount of chemicals they might have been exposed to so long ago, it said, and to separate that from toxic substances encountered elsewhere.

Those problems, the committee concluded, "cannot be overcome with additional study."

The Navy has received 1,583 claims for compensation, totaling $34 billion. None have been settled. The Veterans Administration says it offers no health benefits from the Lejeune contamination.

That hasn't stopped Edwards, 58, who was posted at the base near Jacksonville in southeastern North Carolina three times in a 20-year military career. Suspecting he was exposed to tainted water during the three months he spent in the base's barracks in 1968, he filed a disability claim with VA.

"All the evidence I submitted, the VA threw out," he said, papers strewn over a table on his deck in north Charlotte.

Edwards said he was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, and the diseased kidney was removed the following year. Kidney cancer is among the diseases for which the National Research Council study found tentative evidence of an association with the solvents that contaminated Lejeune's water.

Edwards is cancer-free now but said he has diabetes, lung disease and problems concentrating. He lives on Social Security, state disability and partial VA disability from other injuries.

His Charlotte physician wrote, on his behalf, that exposure to toxic waste could well have been a contributing factor, if not the main factor, in his renal cell cancer.

Last week the VA denied his claim, saying his cancer did not result from chemical exposure at Lejeune.

Even some of his fellow vets scoff at the Lejeune health claims, Edwards said. They don't want to believe the Marine Corps would do that to them.

Far from hiding the truth, said a Marine Corps spokesman in Washington, the Corps contracted for the study released last week.

"It's one step closer to getting an answer for those Marines and their families," said 1st Lt. Brian Block.

The Corps, which is also trying to locate veterans who were at Lejeune during the decades of contamination, will review the report and assess its next steps, Block said.

While finding it's unlikely that the contamination can be firmly blamed for health problems, the study urged the Navy not to delay taking action to address and resolve the concerns associated with the exposures.

The study said people at Lejeune were probably exposed to the industrial solvent trichloroethylene or perchloroethylene, a dry-cleaning chemical, from years of spills or leaks that reached groundwater.

It found some evidence of an association between those chemicals and diseases including cancers of the breast, bladder, kidneys, esophagus and lungs. But the report found insufficient evidence of a link to most of the health problems Lejeune vets have reported.

Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, quickly questioned the validity of the report.

"The resolution of this issue cannot be held hostage to additional scientific studies that may not tell us anything more than we already know," she said in a statement last week.

Hagan said the report didn't take into account earlier studies that associated the Lejeune chemicals with childhood leukemia. She said it gave scant attention to two other cancer-causing chemicals found in the base's water, benzene and vinyl chloride.

In April, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry pulled off its Web site a 1997 study of the Lejeune contamination because it didn't include benzene among the contaminants.

Once the agency completes a study of ways the chemicals could have reached the base's water supply, an official said, the agency will recalculate the pulled report.

Meanwhile, veterans are falling sick, said Jerry Ensminger, co-founder of a group pressing the Marines for action. Many have no insurance, he said.

The retired master sergeant's own daughter Janey, conceived at Lejeune, died at age 9 from leukemia.

Ensminger said he wants more than help for the sick vets and their families. "The truth would be nice," he said, listing his wishes. "Number two, for the Marine Corps to live up to their motto, which is Semper Fidelis [always faithful]. That they live up to their slogan: 'We take care of our own.'"

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TOPICS: veterans, veterans' benefits, VA, Department of Veterans' Affairs, Camp Lejeune, contamination