On Memorial Day, it’s time to make sure veterans with burn pit diseases get care they need
Nora Eisenberg:
“…It goes by different names — Burn Pit disease, Gulf War 2 Syndrome, Iraq and Afghanistan War Lung Injury, Post-Deployment Illness — but what veterans and contract workers who have it, and the small cadre of physician-scientists dedicated to understanding and treating it, agree on is that, like Gulf War Illness, its cause is wartime toxic exposure. An inhalational injury, it attacks the airways and lungs first, and then can wound most every other organ and system. “Burn pits were constant,” Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said, and most everyone was exposed to them “sometime during their deployment.” In 2009, the military admitted that as many as 360,000 veterans may have suffered traumatic brain injury, an, in turn, established programs for research and treatment. But about the systemic disease of our recent wars, the brass is admitting — and doing — almost nothing.
Thousands of sick veterans trace their illness to the burn pits, which the military as well as their contractors KBR and Halliburton used — instead of closed incinerators — to process garbage on US bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. Acres wide and hundreds of feet deep, the open furnaces burned day and night, morphing solid human waste, body parts, blood specimens, plastic water bottles, Styrofoam plates, Humvees, computers and more into black fumes and ash that covered the sky and ground.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/24/on-memorial-day-its-time-to-make-sure-our-veterans-suffering-from-burn-pit-diseases-get-the-care-they-need/?utm_source=Raw+Story+Daily+Update&utm_campaign=2e7fdeb875-5_26_135_26_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1b6404e40c-2e7fdeb875-194845489
Witness Testimony of Dr. Steven S. Coughlin, Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology, Emory University