environment

The following is a recent article about military contamination and the work by advocates…

Friends of Civilian Exposure, This weekend, we pause like many of you to enjoy…

The ongoing conflict between the military and local community environments continues at home and abroad. Will military development in these areas help or hurt the community? Could potential toxins and chemicals infiltrate the surrounding groundwater and soil as is the case with other areas in Okinawa? The following article takes a closer look at the unsteady military/public lands relationship in Okinawa.

Not only do we recognize your service, we also understand the generational health catastrophe plaguing so many of you as a result of exposure to poisonous pollution and contamination aboard our U.S. military bases.  We further recognize the ongoing fight for the care and justice all people impacted so truly deserve.

Since 2002, at least 270 environmental accidents on U.S. Marine Corps bases on Okinawa have contaminated land and local waterways but, until now, almost none of these incidents has been made public. U.S. Marine internal reports highlight serious flaws in training and suggest that the lessons of past accidents have not been effectively implemented. Moreover, recent USMC guidelines order service members not to inform Japanese authorities of accidents deemed “politically sensitive”, raising concerns that many incidents may have gone unreported.

For the next two decades, the US Navy will inject hundreds of thousands of pounds of flares and billions of metal-coated glass fibers into ocean waters off the coasts of Washington and Oregon.

What about service members like me? I’m trying to get tested for PCE and TCE. What can I do? That’s a good question. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done unless your exposure is immediate.  If the exposure happened years (or decades) ago, such as the case with Camp Lejeune victims, then it is likely that it will be very hard to locate traces of the chemicals in your system today. However, that doesn’t mean that damage from exposure doesn’t exist.

Recently, we received a request to look closer into the effects of chemical contamination exposures and fertility. Two chemicals of note, TCE and PFOS, were mentioned. We found some interesting studies/research on both (some provided by readers) that documents some of the threats of chemical exposure to fertility. More importantly, they also bear out a couple of already widely held beliefs about the transferability of these toxins from generation to generation.

We present our top 10 military exposure topics of 2016 covered on CivilianExposure.org (based on total website visitor and subscriber interest). Have a look.

Wouldn’t it be conceivable that most of our service members, civilian workers, and their families/children face exposures at multiple bases during their lives?