Community | March 09, 2013 | 16 comments

Illness From Burn Pits Killing Returning Vets

source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57573445/illness-from-burn-pits-a-health-issue-for-ret...

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coolplanet

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57573445/illness-from-burn-pits...

ROBSTOWN, Texas - A mysterious illness is afflicting veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a crippling lung disease that targets soldiers assigned to work near burn pits. One wife of a stricken soldier is watching her husband suffer and fighting the battle he no longer can.

LeRoy Torres was a Texas state trooper and a captain in the Army Reserves when he deployed for a year-long combat tour to Iraq in 2007.

"The minute he got back," said his wife Rosie,"he was hospitalized, right when he got back. It was like, 'Okay, it's the Iraqi crud,' that's what we kept hearing. After a few weeks, he started having these breathing attacks. It was the scariest moment ever for us."

Rosie said her husband's health issues resulted from exposure to open-air burn pits, which the U.S. military used in Iraq and Afghanistan to torch everything from batteries to body parts.

The Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledged Balad, where Torres was based, disposed of "several hundred tons per day."

"I was very close to the burn pits," said LeRoy from his bed. "That's where I was housed in. But we didn't think nothing of it."

Today, at age 40, LeRoy is barely able to leave bed most days. His doctors have diagnosed him with a lung disease: constrictive bronchiolitis. He has a lesion on his brain and cysts in his spleen and groin.

"Sometimes the headaches will last for three hours," said LeRoy, "Sometimes I've had a headache for eight days. Eight days straight. It's unexplainable.

"I remember one night thinking, 'Who am I holding?'" said Rosie. "'What happened to the man that I married?' It was at that moment that I thought, 'This is it, I'm going to have to be his advocate.'"

She launched a web site where veteran burn pit victims can register. She also lobbied Congress to take action.

In January, President Obama signed a law giving the Secretary of Veterans Affairs one year to create a national registry to track potential burn pit victims.

Dr. Anthony Szema, a professor at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, thinks that if it wasn't for Rosie Torres, the law wouldn't be in existence. He's been analyzing dust from near burn pits.

Szema said 14 percent of veterans he's studied return with some sort of lung complications.

"I think clearly we don't allow people to burn things in an unregulated fashion in the United States," said Szema, "and we have EPA limits against the number of particles in the air." He added: "They should not be doing it over there."

As LeRoy Torres' condition worsens, he may not benefit from the new law. His dream job is gone already.

"It ended his career as a trooper," Rosie said, crying.

The national registry of burn pit victims won't be out until at least 2014. In the meantime, doctors are relying on Rosie Torres' unofficial registry: her information and her continuing search for answers.


Video at link

By Jeff Glor | March 9, 2013 7:39 PM
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  2. tags:
    Insanity,  Gulf War Syndrome,  burn pits
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16 comments // Illness From Burn Pits Killing Returning Vets

  • oldbanjo
  • artemis6
  • Mark701
    • +1
      Mark701  

    • The military can be exceptionally hardheaded when it comes to things like this. In WW II they would have had an excuse for doing things like this because there was no information on the harmful effects of inhaling toxic fumes, but nowadays the information is everywhere. Having worked with the military I have personal knowledge of how macho and cocky they can be when it comes to environmental health issues. Even though I understand the expediencies war forces on the military, the least they could have done was ensure their personnel were upwind and a safe distance from the burn pits.

    • 2 months ago
  • alexandrekBack
    • +3
      alexandrekBack  

    • I understand that soldier is a profession where death has to be expected but in combat, not like that.
      How can we let those young willing men and women die because of a total lack of prevention, i am sure a simple mask could have prevented those loss, I am certain that such job in civil protection would be mandatory.

      we failed them.

    • 2 months ago
  • oldbanjo
  • alexandrekBack
  • oldbanjo
  • Vortices
    • +2
      Vortices [removed]  

    • DOW & Monsanto provided the chemicals that the military flooded South Vietnam with, "agent orange", and poisoned every soldier who had to march through the newly defoliated jungle.....

      I don't get why young people didn't listen to their elders?

      Up to generation X and maybe into Y a little, everybody that wasn't a first or second generation immigrant should have known the military has a rich history of injuring and neglecting it's own.

      Read the writing on the wall, even those vets who believed in the Vietnam war, most would concede our government didn't manage the war or support our troops appropriately afterword.

      On the bright side the military has lowered standards to just under the totally depraved and ignorant can enlist again, and since we live in such a nanny/police state, if you can't make it in the civilian world you can always be a pawn......

      Hell sign up for the reserves, 2 days a month, 24 days a year can earn you an annual salary of right around $20-$22,000 a year, and that's for a total clusterfuck....

      And if that isn't enough you can live with the satisfaction that you are seriously helping sustain a machine that even threatens to take the money people have already payed into social security........

    • 2 months ago
  • cw9000
  • alexandrekBack
  • wolfess
    • +4
      wolfess  

    • Ah yes, it was sooooo important to fight the "war on terror" and again, just like Vietnam, we are killing our HEROES who willingly joined a war that was a LIE! DAMN Bush and Cheney and their vermadon who sent these heroes into harm's way!

    • 2 months ago
  • Des_Akkari
    • +2
      Des_Akkari  
    • wolfess:

      ....screw them and the Dark Bush, Too! This is BS! I hope they organize and take on the people who are screwing them. Imagine if in 2005 you were deployed in the war(s) and you were from New Orleans? That instance and instances like this, should make one think.....why the heck are we fighting for the USA. These Iragi people didn't give you lung disease, and the Afghan didn't refuse to fix the dykes in New Orleans!!!! Yet so many sheeple say nothing and do nothing. I say they should use their training and oath to protect us....against enemies foreign and DOMESTIC!

      One day my, Secretary of Guillotine Affairs will have plenty of work ahead of her... ;-)

    • 2 months ago
  • wolfess
    • 0
      wolfess  
    • Des_Akkari:

      Of course you are right my love, I centered on the shrub and antichrist in an attempt not to further the anger my comments on another thread have engendered, but truth be told, as Bush-dark, the great and powerful Obadrone has shown, he is every bit as complicit as his predecessors.

      And I can hardly wait to begin the job I was born for :-)!

    • 2 months ago
  • Leen61
    • +3
      Leen61  

    • I read about these burn pits in Mother Jones magazine a couple years ago. They should be talked about more often and the higher ups who order this practice, should be held accountable. This is just heinous.

    • 2 months ago
  • Incredulous
    • +5
      Incredulous  

    • How is it that the military can do things like this with complete impunity? Why do we allow morons in uniforms to do things like this everywhere they go? At what point do we hold the decision-makers behind these attrocities accountable? Why are we paying for these murderous war mongers to kill everyone and everything they can? How do we make it stop?

    • 2 months ago
  • coolplanet
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