[CPEO-MEF] LEAD: "The Army Thought He Was Faking His Health Issues. Turns Out He Had Chronic Lead Poisoning."

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

The Army Thought He Was Faking His Health Issues. Turns Out He Had Chronic Lead Poisoning.


By Patricia Kime
New York Times
April 3, 2019
	
At age 30, Stephen Hopkins was back in the Army for a second time. After serving as an enlisted soldier from 1991 to 1995, he returned as an officer in 2000. He was a man who routinely maxed fitness tests and endured physical hardship while deployed to rural locales in Afghanistan. Selected for Special Forces training, Hopkins tackled the demanding courses with gusto, later returning to combat for a total of seven deployments. He had a job he loved and excelled at, and his star was ascending.

But in 2005, Hopkins began experiencing wild swings in blood pressure. And he had other symptoms: crippling nausea, constant dizziness, a skyrocketing heart rate. He was given a diagnosis of common high blood pressure, and for a while he felt better by keeping himself on a high dose of a medication for that condition. He was on deployment in Afghanistan when the nausea returned, with migraine symptoms, abnormal thirst and muddled thinking. Medical tests were inconclusive, leading military doctors and commanders to suspect depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or, worse, “malingering”  the medical term for soldiers who feign sickness to shirk duty

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/magazine/lead-poisoning-military-soldiers.html

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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