http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=475"Poisoned Patriots”
June 12th, 2007 by Jesse Lee
Camp Lejeune Water Under Scrutiny
Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press - June 12, 2007
Marine families who lived at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina over three decades drank water contaminated with toxins as much as 40 times over today’s safety standard, federal health investigators said Tuesday.
The government disclosed results from a new scientific study on the same day that some families testified for Congress about cancers and other illnesses they blame on drinking tainted tap water at the sprawling training and deployment base.
The House Energy and Commerce panel, which held the hearing, described the sickened Marines as “poisoned patriots.”
At least 850 former residents of the base have filed administrative claims, seeking nearly $4 billion, for exposure to the industrial solvents TCE and PCE that contaminated Camp Lejeune’s drinking wells before 1987.
“My wife and I now have new full-time careers just staying alive and figuring out how to pay for it all,” former Navy Dr. Michael Gros of Spring, Texas, said. He was stunned to learn years after his work in the 1980s as an obstetrician and gynecologist at Camp Lejeune that he had a rare non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Gros told lawmakers Tuesday that he has accumulated medical bills of more than $4.5 million and he worries regularly about bankruptcy.