Gadgetory

you know as soon as I arrived in country there in Bellotti I noticed a stench for me just my like just uh like I was living next to a landfill just that that that stench of burning rubber or something just as nasty I had started coughing and had a lot of flame I would hear you know asking other soldiers oh it's just Iraqi Kresser is going to take a couple of weeks to clear out your system we thought your body has to decline the ties it take so many weeks everybody talks about war doing that to you but the symptom is just progressed that's when I started picking up is something wrong something going on in my body that I keep getting sick I always want to be soldiers as I was a kid I was able to fulfill my goals I was 17 years of age when I enlisted in there and the army served six years active duty and joined the reserves back sent to the State Police Academy I was a state trooper 14 years I still remember I was at a small diner with my dad it just asked me so any word on you going Iraq I said there's no dad it's been been fortunate and not even ten minutes my phone rang like saying I'm I'm in Iraq and the Sunday before Thanksgiving November 2007 I landed there a lot was a pretty nice place subway Burger King you know glad I made actually I had to go to the clinic because I I developed a real bad call and I didn't have an erisa Tory infection and the you know the medic office I saw oh yeah that's hysterical cried but I'm like copies I've already been here for a month almost longer returned around the 30th of October 2008 not even two weeks I was already in the emergency room I think they had already sent him home from his job at that point like you can't come back you need to find an answer to what's wrong with you because we can't have you here just breathe take a deep breath okay okay take a deep breath what happened they ended up here Stephie a lot of good good good champion player so he every night laying in bed just constantly sick I googled soldiers coming back dying from Iraq I don't know it just kind of some phrase that would give me a connection and just found this community of people that were all sharing their stories and we're all going through the same things we were going through so that was just a sigh of relief because it was like we're not alone we're not crazy it's not in our head there actually is something going on that there's an explanation to hey never burns get down here when they get a good shot burn pits were used in Iraq and are still used in Afghanistan to dispose they are open-air just what it says pits into which all of the waste that is developed or that is produced at a particular brace are put and then those wastes are burnt so it's everything from styrofoam to plastic bottles to munitions to human waste - in some cases body parts you name it all put in these open-air burn pits and then set a fire and in many cases these were burned pits that burned 24/7 I mean they never went out and the thick black cloud of toxins basically hung over the base and remember how we got into Iraq you never forget that Donald Rumsfeld said that you go to war with the army you have not the army you want I mean so there was no thought as best I can tell to how to deal with the waste in a safe and responsible way so your choice is really to bury it or burn it I mean those those are really the only two choices and the decision was made to burn our data established a link for constrictive bronchiolitis following service in both Iraq and Afghanistan and I'm concerned that open pit burning is one of those causes constrictive bronchiolitis is a disorder that affects the small Airways of the lung and spares the rest of the lung which is why you probably don't see changes on chest CT scan and chest x-ray some of the providers have told them that there's nothing wrong with them some of them have told them to deconditioned it's important to this group of people that they have someone who listened to them and it's important to them that their symptoms are explained the center is it's a nonprofit organization founded by my family in memory of my brother who was a Marine Corps sergeant Thomas Joseph Sullivan the initial symptoms of his illness began while he was in Iraq the treatment he was offered was primarily psychological and what he was looking for was physiological treatment physiological diagnosis for physiological symptoms after he died the primary care physician who was responsible for his care told us his family in a meeting that he had believed and to some extent still believed that Tom had suffered from a psychosomatic illness we then learned of course that all of Tom's symptoms are very similar we're very similar to the symptoms that people are getting after breathing in the toxic fumes and chemicals and burn pits sand and dust the VA has tracked over 400,000 nearly half a million servicemembers from the post 9/11 era wars who have medically unexplained physical symptoms I want to know what causes these illnesses and now it's not just about Tom it's about hundreds of thousands of people potentially who are sick Michelle Pierce is a fighter she battled stomach cancer in 2008 and then doctors discovered another tumor in her lung it's a cough that never goes away it's a your your sinuses are burning your eyes are burning all of a sudden you'll get a fever so it's returning from home in July I have suffered from a number of respiratory problems related to the exposure when we met that whole community of people that were having the same symptoms is when we realized that we had to open that pathway for them to that's when God put it in our heart to to invest our time and our energy and being the voice for other people kind of finding somewhere where they can go and just click and say okay there's doctors these are health care providers that are that have researched and discovered the soul medicine we'll just put that information there and throw this information in here and put a registry together we developed it as as a platform to show the VA and DOD that there is a need and so every day there's an entry on the registry so the VA can't see that then I don't know what else to say we would like to see them step up and say okay let's take the torch from here and and do what needs to be done because I don't have the resources to respond to all of these thousands of people they need help in both Afghanistan and Iraq open air burn pits were widely used at Forward Operating basis disposing of trash and other debris was a major challenge commanders had to find a way to dispose of waste while concentrating on the important mission at hand the solution that was chosen however had serious risks everybody that went to Iraq and Afghanistan knew that if they walked off the base they were exposing themselves to danger they all knew that I mean sadly that's a fact or fact of life and war but the fact that they were exposed to potentially fatal levels of danger on their own bases is something that we that we have to address and we have to we have to rectify to the greatest extent we can when we first got involved in the issue the first thing we looked at was to get them the burn pits banned that was number one the second thing we then went after was to begin to construct a registry of those who had been exposed to the burn pits this bill is a step towards finding the answers we owe them the legislation will establish and maintain an open burn pit registry for those individuals who may have been exposed during their military service the and the Department of Defense have have really been very slow to assert and that burn pit exposure has long-term health implications perhaps the only way they're going to draw that conclusion is if they've got some some data that's that's irrefutable we were going to just sit back and say okay you're the next Agent Orange and you need to sit 35 years in the back burner in wait and so let's see how many people die until that and then and then we'll get you what you need we weren't going to do that we want to work with them in delivering the right type of registry the right information the truth at this point in time we've developed a questionnaire it'll be a point in time snapshot of what they were exposed to what they self-report they're exposed to what their health concerns are what their current health conditions are we would like everyone who deployed to participate in this registry even if they today don't have any symptoms or concerns that way we get the broadest picture of what people's exposures were the purpose of this registry is to register people who have been exposed to burn pits and airborne hazards this particular registry asks more questions about residential history non-military occupational history current occupational status there's no question in here as to what burn pit you were stationed near we really don't want to just focus on burn pits burn pits are obviously something you can see and you it's very possible you have acute health effects from the smoke and the gases but the uncertainty is what the long-term consequences are from the information we have the probability is that most symptoms we resolve after deployment I think that it's important in a questionnaire like that that it meet a some type of standard for occupational medicine unfortunately there are a lot of delays and it may be that the action is going to be more based on the politics than on the science it's a step in the right direction and I'm delighted that we were able to get the registry but I will say that they you know the Department of Defense I envy a I wish were sort of more receptive to the notion that we've got a real serious long-term health problem on our hands here and that is something that we've got to deal with the clearest and most obvious question that's omitted is a question have have you ever been diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis we have not seen a large increase in constrictive bronchiolitis cases most cases of constrictive bronchiolitis we've seen in other aspects in other situations such as lung transplant there's some cases that are seen with exposure to flavorings like such as popcorn flavorings and so we're not certain exactly what it means or what dr. Miller has seen the only reason I can think that those questions would not would be left out intentionally is that the VA for some reason does not want to have that information in its possession for the past 4 and 1/2 years I was a senior epidemiologist in the office of public health at the Department of Veterans Affairs in December 2012 I resigned my position in the u.s. civil service because a serious ethical ethical concerns that I'm here to testify about today the office of public health conducts large studies of the health of American veterans however if the studies produce results that do not support the Office of Public Health unwritten policy they don't release them this applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan and toxic exposures in the Gulf War on the rare occasions when embarrassing study results our release data are manipulated to make them unintelligible we were interested in inhalational hazards like potential exposure to burn pits and dust and fumes and you know I was being told don't look at the data you know we're not going to explore the data thoroughly and that sort of thing these studies cost tens of millions of dollar it's us taxpayers fund and what they were doing was against the interest of the veterans who participated in the studies and against the interests of US veterans in general it was just an untenable position for me because my supervisors were doing things that were greatly unethical I think the VA and the DoD are very used to having control over the information and they don't they don't have control over it Rosie Torres can do her own registry on the burn pits 360 website using Vistaprint and whatever she can put together and she's going to keep doing it while the VA spends 1.5 million dollars or more collecting information that may never be useful to anyone you know I don't want to speculate but I will say that it is I mean look at how long it's taken to fully recognize the implications of Agent Orange I mean it was just what summer of 2011 that a whole family of conditions were added to the list of presumptive causes you know the last one of our troops left left Vietnam in 1975 and they you know so whatever that is 36 years that that it took to get that done now one of the things that I'm determined isn't going to happen is it's not going to take 36 years for us to properly deal with those that we have exposed to burn beds in the beginning the language that was written was definitely saying that there's not an association between the exposure and the illnesses slowly they're acknowledging a little that that these people are not going to go away and that there needs to be a change but not not happy with the pace that they're going at the rate they're going with with acknowledging all that acceptance is a huge statement you know Pat to deal with is just accepting the fact that I'm not the same person who I was before the exposure you know we're hanging that flag up the other day and it makes him proud and and although we've been through things with DoD and VA and to me that's just a price of war every war has its price it's like I mentioned before that I would do it all over again which may sound crazy but it's just something that's what is something that's in your heart and your desire to do it it's like you do it at all cost I absolutely am patriotic and till the day I die I mean I ought to have lag so until they hang my left leg on my coffin you