Thousands of veterans fear "burn pits" exposed them to lethal disease

[Judi Lynn]

CBS NEWS August 17, 2019, 10:56 AM

Over 1.5 million American troops were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011. Many returned with visible scars of war – but for some, their injury is hidden. At some of the military bases throughout those regions, waste materials were disposed of in so-called "burn pits." Breathing fumes from the burn pit fires appears to have damaged the health of countless veterans.

Air Force veteran Dan Jentik struggles with what most don't even think about: taking a breath. Jentik is part of a lung study at the National Jewish hospital in Denver. But he's also part of a much larger group: he was one of thousands of men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who may be sick or dying because they inhaled smoke from massive burn pits next to their bases.

Jentik said the pits smelled acrid, like "when you burn plastic." He said, "you just constantly saw the smoke or you smelled it, pretty much everyday, all day."

Batteries, chemicals, heavy metals and arsenic all went into the burn pits, among other things.

"It is indefensible that U.S. military personnel, who are already at risk of serious injury and death when fighting the enemy, were put at further risk from the potentially harmful emissions from the use of open-air burn pits," said a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

More:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/burn-pit-military-lung-disease-thousands-of-veterans-fear-burn-pits-exposed-them-to-lethal-disease-2019-08-17/

Yikes! How could that not be a problem? Click this link, images of burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan:

https://tinyurl.com/y57fxk28

[tblue37]

1. One of my fruends, sent to Iraq twice in the Reserves, ended up crippled with a degenerative

nerve disease afterward. He was in his late twenties.

[FirstLight]

2. awful...

And far be it for the US to give a shit about the environmental effects on the people who LIVE there either...wouldn't this eventually work it's way down into the groundwater too?

here's another article I found when looking at the images this is just despicable.

https://newrepublic.com/article/138058/things-burned

[randr]

3. Bidens son was stationed near one

His brain cancer was a result. Way too much evidence out there to deny a connection.
The burn piles will be the agent orange of the Gulf Wars.

[NNadir]

4. My mother died from Brain cancer. I have studied it, as a result, extensively.

Before I embarked on a scientific career, I had all kinds of wild speculations that what caused my mother's brain cancer. They were, and even now with more evidence, not scientifically justifiable. In fact, on reflection, they bordered on silliness.

I learned recently that there is good evidence, based on the clusters of brain cancers among her co-workers, that it may have been related to her work in a factory that made electronic relays - the plant is now a superfund site - but this is hardly proof. It is possible my mother had a gene in one of her brain cells whacked by a cosmic ray.

It is decidedly not possible to make a statement that anyone's cancer is the result from any single event.

Cancer is a very complex disease, subject to any of thousands of natural shocks.

We don't serve ourselves well when we engage in wild speculations. Such speculations are anti-scientific. There are well known health effects from air pollution, thought to kill about seven million people every year, but to state that any particular person was specifically killed by a particular event is notoriously difficult, and even with Bayesian analysis, not very necessarily accurate.

[randr]

5. I would speculate that clusters

are a good reason to look for an environmental connection.

[NNadir]

6. Perhaps so. However this article does not offer any evidence of there being such a cluster...

...among veterans.

It is a report written by a journalist, and I sometimes joke that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course.

Therefore any speculation about Beau Biden's tragic passing lacks validity if one asserts that his cancer was definitely the result of his military experience in one of the eternal US wars.

Simply because other people in my mother's work place died of brain cancer does not prove that my mother's case was related. It may have been, or may not have been. The probability that it was is higher, but it is not proof.

I recently read Siddharta Mukherjee's book The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer.

It is a wonderful work of scientific history that shows how very difficult it was to even prove that cigarettes cause cancer.

My father was a smoker, and died of cancer, beginning with esophageal cancer ending with lung cancer. I am not a smoker, because he was, and it does seem likely that his cancer was related to smoking. His brother, my uncle, also died in the same way; he too was a smoker.

My physician has warned me not to be so smug about what caused my father's cancer and my uncle's cancer. I have always attributed them to smoking, but it is quite possible that my family possesses an oncogene that does not need cigarette tars to activate it.