Re: [CPEO-MEF] Military Personnel and Families

[Pauline Simon <cpeo@cpeo.org>]

[from Linda Price King <EHN33@aol.com>]

My name is Linda Price King.  I sit on a citizen oversight committee
that is overseeing the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry
(ATSDR).  The last meeting I went to the very questions you were asking
were being discussed.  I am not sure if your questions would be answered
the way you might like but they were discussed.

As far as I know - no, there is not a real health monitoring system that
really looks seriously at the exposures that military families have. 
There are many people like yourself that were calling in at that meeting
asking the same questions.  This meeting was about Department of Defense
(DOD) Superfund sites and how the DOD and ATSDR were addressing health
problems.  As far as I am concerned, problems are not being addressed
but pushed under the rug. Because the responsible parties are also the
ones in charge of the clean up and potential  help for damaged
individuals, the problem remains serious.  

As you know the military has the right to give their active personnel
vaccines even if the person does not want to take them.  Military
personnel  have no rights.  Their dependents are pressured in many of
the same ways the enlisted are - loyalty is used as a ploy but paychecks
and threats are often at the center.

The people who are civilians who live around the bases are another
innocent  group who are given no information about their possible
exposures and potential health problems.  So the list of victims go on
and on.

There are many populations that are transient, but that should not stop
the  military from being able to track the possible exposures people
have had.  Political will is what stops them.  Through medical records
and duty records, they could track people and compare it to what they
know is at the bases where they have served.  That is not rocket science
but it is a threat!


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