Doctor from Camp Lejeune - and TCE

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Doctor Paying the Price for School

Naval base water, cancer tie possible

By LISE OLSEN
Houston Chronicle
April 4, 2004

As a young doctor repaying the Navy for medical school, Mike Gros was
delighted when he got assigned to Camp Lejeune, a Marine training base
on the North Carolina coast.

He and his wife, Janie, looked forward to spending balmy summers on the
beach and living in officers' housing along the New River in a
close-knit community of military doctors and families.

Then, shortly after they arrived in 1980, Marine officials discovered
that the water being piped into their two-story home was "highly
contaminated" with solvents and dry-cleaning fluid.

"For three years, while we lived there, we were basically poisoned,"
Janie Gros said. The Groses, who now live in Champion Forest, are among
an estimated 200,000 former base residents who consumed the water
between 1968 and 1985. The wells were closed in 1985.

But it wasn't until 1999 that they learned about the contamination.
That's when the federal government began a survey that has found the
children conceived on the base have developed cancer at twice the
expected rate.

No one is looking at how many adults may have gotten cancer from the
water, in part because of the logistics and cost of contacting thousands
of current and former Marines and their families.

...

for the entire story, see
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2483384#top


--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org