Semper Poisoned? Post-Vietnam Marines At Camp LeJeune Have 20% Higher Cancer Risk

ANALYSIS – The Marine motto is Semper Fidelis (Semper Fi for short). But in one case it could be stated as Semper (“always”) Poisoned.

There has been a lot of bad news recently about U.S. military bases having contaminated water, or fuel spills or other toxic “forever chemicals” in the ground where our warriors and their families work, train and live.

Others have documented the health hazards to our troops of Agent Orange in Vietnam and so-called “burn pits.” And none of it is acceptable.

And they all need to be immediately corrected. Meanwhile, multiple class-action lawsuits have been launched. And in 2023 Congress passed the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act.

The Veterans Administration (VA) is responsible for managing this, probably the largest health care and benefit expansion in VA history.

But now we have a new government study that shows Marines and civilians based at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s are at least 20% more likely to develop certain types of cancers compared to Camp Pendleton, a similar Marine base in Southern California.

All this from the North Carolina base's contaminated drinking water.

Fortunately for me, I was stationed at Pendleton in the late 1980s. But hundreds of thousands of others weren't so lucky.

The research, launched by the CDC in 2015 is billed as one of the largest ever done in the United States to assess cancer risk by comparing a group who lived and worked in a polluted environment to a similar group that didn't.

Military Times reported:

The study found military personnel stationed at U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, were at higher risk for some types of leukemia and lymphoma and cancers of the lung, breast, throat, esophagus and thyroid. Civilians who worked at the base also were at a higher risk for a shorter list of cancers.

The Times added:

Camp Lejeune was built in a sandy pine forest along the North Carolina coast in the early 1940s. Its drinking water was contaminated with industrial solvents from the early 1950s to 1985. The contamination — detected in the early 1980s — was blamed on a poorly maintained fuel depot and indiscriminate dumping on the base, as well as from an off-base dry cleaner.

Before wells were shut down, contaminated water was piped to barracks, offices, housing for enlisted families, schools and the base's hospital. Military personnel and families drank it, cooked with it and bathed in it.

CNN noted that:

Drinking water at Camp Lejeune was heavily contaminated with a number of cancer-causing industrial chemicals, including trichloroethylene or TCE, vinyl chloride and benzene, from 1953 to 1985. Hundreds of thousands of service members in the Marines and Navy as well as civilians employed at the base were unwittingly exposed to the chemicals when they drank the water, inhaled steam in the shower and even simply washed their hands.

Previous studies have shown that people exposed to the contaminated water there were more likely to die of certain blood and organ cancers and about 70% more likely to get Parkinson's disease. There have also been questions about birth defects and infertility in people who were exposed.

Meanwhile, this official government study could lead to an expanded list of conditions allowing veterans and civilians who worked at LeJeune to receive government compensation.

However, some experts may not be fully convinced that this study is definitive proof. Military Times continued: “The study is ‘quite impressive,' but cannot count as final proof that the tainted drinking water caused the cancers, said David Savitz, a Brown University disease researcher who is consulting for plaintiffs' attorneys in Camp Lejeune-related litigation.”

The Times added:

“This is not something we're going to be able to resolve definitively,” he said. “We are talking about exposures that happened (decades ago) that were not well documented.”

Still, Savitz said the new research will add needed weight to the legal arguments of people who got sick after living and working at the base.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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