CDC report shows danger at Camp Lejeune

The Virginian-Pilot
© December 11, 2013

 

The horror of Camp Lejeune, already one of the worst cases of drinking water contamination in American history, continues to grow. So does the shame of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed a long-suspected link between toxic chemicals in drinking water at the base and an increased risk of birth defects and childhood cancer.
The contamination stretches back decades, with exposure ending in 1987, when the Marine Corps closed the last of contaminated wells at the base.

Based on a survey of the parents of more than 12,000 children born at Lejeune between 1968 and 1985, the CDC concluded that pregnant women who drank tap water at the base were four times more likely to have babies with serious birth defects such as spina bifida. The study also found a slightly elevated risk for childhood cancers such as leukemia.

The study is limited in its findings. Researchers told The Associated Press that they were able to confirm only 52 cases of specific illnesses related to chemical exposure at Lejeune based on medical records. The cause can't be definitely shown for other birth defects and cancer diagnoses.

But the CDC study is the latest evidence of widespread health problems linked to leaks from a fuel depot at the base and a dry cleaner outside the base.

Although some of the contaminants were addressed in federal regulations dating to 1963, the Marine Corps repeatedly downplayed health problems at Lejeune over the years and didn't take action until 1985.

By that time, an estimated 1 million Marines and their families had been exposed.

Last year, President Barack Obama signed legislation expanding health care resources for those individuals. (Information on compensation claims for Lejeune veterans and their families can be found at the Department of Veterans Affairs website at http://goo.gl/D48rJS.)

The compensation covers 15 health problems, including multiple forms of cancer. More than 80 men with connections to Lejeune have been diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer.

For the Marine Corps and the VA, the mission remains much as it was before last week's news. They need to expedite claims and continue reaching out to veterans and their families and to any civilians who may have been exposed to carcinogens at the base.

Research also should continue on the extent of contamination. Among other things, the government needs to delve deeper into reports of problems related to storage of DDT and other insecticides in a building later used as a day care.

The government also must explore further when the contamination began. The legislation covers exposure beginning in 1957, but some research indicates at least one carcinogen may have been present as early as 1948.

Last week's CDC report was difficult but welcome news for Lejeune veterans and family members who've fought many years for answers.

The Marine Corps, the VA, the president and Congress need to continue working to address those concerns.

The loss of human life and the suffering cannot be reversed. But the Marine Corps can ensure it doesn't leave behind the men and women whose health was damaged at Lejeune.

Birth Defects Linked To Contaminated Marine Base Water

Birth Defects Linked To Contaminated Marine Base Water

By Sara Jerome
Contaminated water at a U.S. Marine Corps base in North Carolina may be a cause of neural tube defects (NTDs) in some children, according to a long-awaited study.

The study from the Centers for Disease Control found "associations between TCE and benzene in Camp Lejeune drinking water and NTDs," the report said.

Survey participants reported "35 NTDs, 42 oral clefts, and 29 childhood hematopoietic cancers," the study said. CDC "made extensive efforts to obtain medical information from health providers to confirm reported cases.  ATSDR was able to confirm 15 NTDs, 24 oral clefts, and 13 cancers."

The effects were observed "in children born from 1968 to 1985 whose mothers were exposed to contaminated drinking water in their residences at Camp Lejeune."

The study also observed "weaker associations" between "first trimester exposure to PCE, vinyl chloride, and 1,2- DCE," and childhood hematopoietic cancers such as leukemia.

According to the Associated Press, "a prior CDC study cited a February 1985 level for trichloroethylene of 18,900 parts per billion in one Lejeune drinking water well — nearly 4,000 times today's maximum allowed health limit of 5 ppb. Testing also found high levels of benzene, a fuel additive."

The contamination was caused by "a leaky on-base fuel depot and an off-base dry cleaner," the report said.
In the nearly 30 years since the contamination was first publicly disclosed, "military officials have repeatedly issued public statements downplaying health risks from drinking the tainted water prior to the closure of the most contaminated wells," the AP said.

The base kept using the wells for years even after tainted water was discovered, the AP reported. "The most highly contaminated wells were closed in 1984 and 1985, after a round of more extensive testing found dangerous concentrations of toxins associated with degreasing solvents and gasoline."

Lejeune spokeswoman Captain Maureen Krebs said in a statement published by Reuters that the Marine Corps has supported attempts to study the effects of the tainted water.

"These results provide additional information in support of ongoing efforts to provide comprehensive science-based answers to the health questions that have been raised," she said.

A law passed last year attempted to help those affected by the water. The law provides "medical care to former Marines and their dependents who were exposed to the contaminated wells between 1957 and 1987. The law covers 15 conditions including miscarriage, female infertility, leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and several other forms of cancer," an editorial in Star News Online said.

Air pollutants linked to higher risk of birth defects, researchers find

 

3/28/2013

BY ERIN DIGITALE - Breathing traffic pollution in early pregnancy is linked to a higher risk for certain serious birth defects, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The finding comes from a study examining air quality and birth-defect data for women living in California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the smoggiest regions of the country. “We found an association between specific traffic-related air pollutants and neural tube defects, which are malformations of the brain and spine,” said the study’s lead author, Amy Padula, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in pediatrics. The research appears online today in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

“Birth defects affect one in every 33 babies, and about two-thirds of these defects are due to unknown causes,” said the paper’s senior author, Gary Shaw, PhD, professor of neonatal and developmental medicine. “When these babies are born, they bring into a family’s life an amazing number of questions, many of which we can’t answer.”

The scientists studied 806 women who had a pregnancy affected by a birth defect between 1997 and 2006, and 849 women who had healthy babies during the same period. The study examined two types of neural tube defects (spina bifida, a spinal-column malformation, and anencephaly, an underdeveloped or absent brain); cleft lip, with or without cleft palate; cleft palate only; and gastroschisis, in which the infant is born with some of his or her intestines outside the body.

All women studied resided in an area of California known for poor air quality — the San Joaquin Valley — during the first eight weeks of their pregnancies, a window of time when many birth defects develop. The researchers asked each woman for her home address during this period and scored subjects’ exposure to air pollutants using data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency as part of federally mandated air-quality monitoring. The pollutants assessed included carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and ozone, as well as local traffic density.

After controlling for factors such as race/ethnicity, maternal education and multivitamin use, women who breathed the highest levels of carbon monoxide were nearly twice as likely to have a baby with spina bifida or anencephaly as those with the lowest carbon monoxide exposure, the study found. Nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide exposures were also linked to increased risk for these defects; women with the highest nitrogen oxide exposure had nearly three times the risk of having a pregnancy affected by anencephaly than those with the lowest exposure, for example. Further studies are needed to examine the combined effects of multiple pollutants.

The quality of earlier research linking air pollution and birth defects has been hampered by the difficulty of getting reliable data on women’s exposure to pollutants. The new study is the first to assess women’s pollutant exposures in early pregnancy, when birth defects are developing, rather than at birth.

Further studies are needed to confirm the results of the new research and to examine other pollutants, as well as other types of birth defects, the researchers said.

“If these associations are confirmed, this work offers an avenue for a potential intervention for reducing birth defects,” Padula said.

“In addition, for our colleagues who are bench scientists, this work gives them an opportunity to think about what pollution exposures might mean mechanistically,” Shaw said. “It could give them a better understanding of the details of human development.”

Suzan Carmichael, PhD, associate professor of neonatal and developmental medicine, was another Stanford co-author. Scientists at the University of California-Berkeley and at Sonoma Technology Inc. in Sonoma, Calif., were also involved in the work.

The study was funded by grants from the National Institute for Environmental Health Science (grant ES018173), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Information about Stanford’s Department of Pediatrics, which also supported the work, is available at http://pediatrics.stanford.edu.

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. For more information, please visit the Office of Communication & Public Affairs site at http://mednews.stanford.edu/.

Prescriptions for valproate not decreasing despite birth defect-causing concerns

7/24/2013

A recent study shows that prescriptions for the antiepileptic drug valproate have not decreased in recent years even though the drug is known to cause severe birth defects and brain damage.

A new study indicates that women without epilepsy are four times as likely to be prescribed this drug as are women with epilepsy.

Led by Godfrey P. Oakley, Jr. MD, research professor at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, a research team analyzed data from the National Hospital and Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys from 1996 to 2007 to examine valproate prescriptions for adolescent girls and adult women aged 14-45 years. Findings from the study concluded that 83 percent of valproate prescriptions were written for women without epilepsy, with 74 percent of those prescribed for psychiatric, non-epilepsy diagnoses and the remaining valproate prescriptions used for conditions such as pain, migraine and other non-epilepsy conditions.

"We were surprised to find that there was no decrease in the number of valproate prescriptions prescribed to women of reproductive-age  despite the numerous, less harmful antiepileptic drugs available and the proven evidence of valproate's harmful effects during pregnancy," says Oakley who is also the director of Emory's Center for Spina Bifida Research, Prevention, and Policy.
The complete study is published in the June 3, 2013 edition of the Birth Defects Research Part A—Clinical and Molecular Teratology journal.

"We believe that sharply reducing the use of valproate for reproductive-age women is an important step in preventing birth defects," explains Oakley.

Water contamination victim speaks out

McMurray expects VA case to reach full resolution in near future

September 02, 2012 11:12 AM

Spina bifida. Asperger’s syndrome. Tourette’s. Bipolar disorder. Organic brain dysfunction. These are just a few of the diseases William McMurray Jr. suffers from, ailments he says his doctors couldn’t explain for the first 20 years of his life — until they learned of water contamination aboard Camp Lejeune.

His is but one story in what many call the greatest case of contamination in U.S. history. A million Marines, sailors and their families drank, bathed, brushed their teeth, cooked, swam and washed their cars, clothes, dishes and pets in bad water at Lejeune for decades.

“I spent so long not knowing why I am the way I am,” McMurray, 29, said in telephone interviews last week from his Tyler, Texas, home. “When they finally found the conditions and why I was like this I was so ticked.”

The horrors of the contamination weren’t understood immediately. One base housing resident reported the unexplainable death of his dog. Another said goldfish always ended up floating at the top of the aquarium. More than 1,000 babies were stillborn or died in infancy aboard the base from 1947 to 1987, according to an exhaustive survey of death certificates filed at the Onslow County Register of Deeds.

The Department of the Navy recommended 50 years ago the regulation of many of the worst chemicals that found their way into Lejeune’s water supply, according to 1963’s Manual of Naval Preventive Medicine, which was just recently made public.

But throughout the 1960s and 70s, military and civilian employees poured oil into storm drains, improperly disposed of car batteries and tossed out used tires and countless other items around the base, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which recorded an incident involving the burial of dog carcasses used in radiological testing.

By then, the wells that supplied the base’s potable water swirled with more than 70 toxic chemicals including trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, benzene and vinyl chloride, according to EPA reports.

By 1980, military and civilian scientists were sounding alarms that Lejeune’s water was poisonous, but wells were not closed for another four years and only after state officials became involved, according to transcripts of Congressional hearings on the matter.

McMurray was born at the Naval Hospital on Oct. 24, 1982. His father, a hospital corpsman and Vietnam veteran, had moved his family into base housing in the year prior. By the time McMurray was born, his mother had already had one miscarriage and months spent drinking and using the polluted water in their Tarawa Terrace home.

McMurray was born in a specialized laboratory because of his multiple dysfunctions and doctors didn’t expect him to live long. Even if he did survive, they told his parents, he would never walk. McMurray proved them wrong, but not without consequence. As he grew his development stalled, and he was barely able to speak. It took years before he uttered his first words, and he spent most of his childhood in and out of hospitals undergoing tests for the myriad of conditions with which he has been diagnosed, he said.
Beginning in 1984, military officials began to point publicly to a small, off-base dry cleaner as the source of contamination without disclosing to environmental regulators that depot storage tanks at Hadnot Point aboard base had leaked around 1,500 gallons of fuel into the ground every month for years. When the contamination made headlines, the base’s commanding general assured his Marines and their families that their water was safe when chemical levels were among the highest ever seen in a public water system, according to a series of investigative reports published by newspapers in Florida, which is home to more than 12,000 veterans affected by water contamination — the most of any state except North Carolina.
Trichloroethylene was found at 1,400 parts per billion at Naval Hospital; 1,148 ppb at an elementary school; and 18,900 ppb in a water well — up to 280 times higher than what the EPA considers safe today, according to a review of hundreds of previously safe-guarded military documents made public by the Senate in July.

Lejeune was declared a Superfund site in 1989, giving the EPA authority to clean it up. For the next two decades, veterans fought for answers and help from the government with thousands dying of cancer. Military officials made it difficult for anyone, even federally-funded researchers, to obtain any pertinent information or documentation on the contamination, according to court records and archived reports.

The federal government in 2005 cleared the Marine Corps of any criminal conduct in handling the contamination. An EPA investigator later testified before Congress that he wanted to charge several Lejeune officers with obstruction of justice but had been overruled by a Justice Department counterpart.

When McMurray finally came to terms with his conditions in 2010, he took his case to Veteran’s Affairs, with whom he’s been fighting ever since. By 2011, good news for veterans and dependents like McMurray began to trickle out as the EPA officially ruled Lejeune water contaminant TCE to be a human carcinogen. The issue reached its tipping point in 2012 when lawmakers from North Carolina and Florida crossed the aisle to push through bipartisan legislation. The resulting Aug. 6 law requires Veteran’s Affairs to provide medical treatment to military members and — for the first time — dependents who spent at least a month aboard Lejeune from 1957 to 1987.

Total costs are estimated at $3.9 billion over 10 years. Civilian workers could be entitled to medical benefits under a different law, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

McMurray said his Veteran’s Affairs case is expected to reach full resolution within the next few weeks. Several lawsuits filed by other former Lejeune residents are still pending in federal court. A federal report on the number of diseases linked to the contamination is expected to be completed in 2014.

U.S. to begin cleaning up Agent Orange at tainted Vietnamese site

U.S. to begin cleaning up Agent Orange at tainted Vietnamese site

August 8, 2012

More than half a century after the United States began dousing Vietnam with the defoliant Agent Orange in a bid to clear the jungle that provided cover for Viet Cong fighters, it is about to begin cleaning up one of the most contaminated spots left over from the war.

The cleanup is expected to take four years and cost more than $43 million. It is the first time that the U.S. has joined with Vietnam to completely cleanse a site tainted with Agent Orange, which has been linked to birth defects, cancer and other ailments.

"This is huge, considering that for many years the U.S. and Vietnam could not see eye to eye at all about this issue," said Susan Hammond, director of the War Legacies Project, a Vermont-based nonprofit group. "It was one of the last unresolved war legacies between the U.S. and Vietnam."

The problem of Agent Orange had long divided the two nations, which still disagree over the health effects caused by the toxin. The chemical spray contains dioxin, which clings to bits of soil and can be ingested by fish and birds, pulling it into the human food chain. The Red Cross estimates that 3 million Vietnamese have been affected, including at least 150,000 children born with birth defects.

Near the Da Nang site, Vo Duoc fought tears as he told the Associated Press that he and other family members, who have suffered diabetes, breast cancer and miscarriages, had tested high for dioxin. Now he fears his grandchildren could be exposed as well.

"They had nothing to do with the war," Duoc told the AP. "But I live in fear that they'll test positive like me."
The U.S. has chipped in for programs to help Vietnamese youth with disabilities but has shied away from saying their problems are specifically linked to the chemical. Vietnam has bristled at that resistance, pointing out that the U.S. has paid billions of dollars in disability payments to American veterans suffering illnesses linked to Agent Orange.

It wasn't until 2006 that the two countries were able to start progressing toward concrete action, as economic and strategic ties grew firmer. President George W. Bush visited six years ago; growing U.S. engagement with Vietnam to offset the rise of China has bolstered the relationship since.

"Many people in Vietnam had given up hope that anything would ever be done about it," said Charles Bailey, director of the Agent Orange in Vietnam Program at the Aspen Institute. "Instead, we find that the U.S. is stepping up to the plate."

The U.S. also became more willing to partner with Vietnam to mitigate the effects of Agent Orange as studies began to show its risks were contained, affecting tens of thousands of people instead of tens of millions, Hammond said. The worst hot spots were narrowed down to a handful of sites.

 

Da Nang, once used as an American military base, is widely seen as the most worrisome hot spot because it sits in the middle of a densely populated city. Nearby lakes are used to raise fish and ducks for human consumption.

Vietnamese authorities poured a concrete slab over the most badly contaminated area 4 1/2 years ago, with technical assistance from U.S. environmental officials and the Ford Foundation, Bailey said. American aid officials also helped plan for the remaining cleanup to destroy the dioxin in soil and sediment on the site.
"At last we're working towards a solution," said Bailey, who lived a decade in Vietnam and has visited frequently since to work on the issue. He plans to attend the ceremony kicking off the cleanup Thursday. "It's good for the Vietnamese. It's good for the Americans. And it's good to get this behind us."

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times