Families Against Cancer & Toxics
Stop cancer before it starts
September 6, 2009
WHAT WAS IN MARINES' WATER?
BY MEGHA SATYANARAYANA
DETROIT FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Shelby Township resident James Fontella is a breast cancer survivor who believes contaminated water at the Camp Lejeune military base in North Carolina caused his illness.
The Marines are trying to determine whether he and 3,346 other Michiganders with various illnesses are correct about a possible link.
They are among 144,000 people nationwide participating in a study on the health effects of drinking water at Camp Lejeune between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s.
The list includes servicemen such as Mike Doyle and John Yeip of Warren and Pat Flynn, who lives near Iron Mountain, all with kidney problems; Natalie McPherson, whose husband, Anthony, died of Hodgkin's disease; Tim Heffron of Grand Rapids, who has lumps in his chest; and Joshua Smith of Chelsea, Kathleen Armstrong of Redford Township and Richard Herr of Jackson -- three breast cancer survivors.
Fontella, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran, wants more than confirmation. He wants compensation.
As a veteran, he can't sue the government, but he and two others asked Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to co-sponsor a bill that would ensure hospital, medical and nursing home care for Camp Lejeune veterans and families.
Camp Lejeune is a Superfund site now -- the federal government ordered the military to clean it up.
United by service -- and cancer
James Fontella has been on a crusade since the day a stranger called him.
"You're not going to believe this," Mike Partain, a 41-year-old breast cancer survivor in Florida told the Shelby Township man.
It was December 2008 and Fontella, 63, listened -- he'd lost his right breast to cancer in 1998. Partain told him of a picture he'd seen of a bare-chested Fontella on the Internet, showing his mastectomy scar and his Marines jacket. Partain said there were others like them -- men with breast cancer, which is 100 times less common in men than women.
There was one more link: Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
On the base between the 1950s and 1980s, they drank and bathed in well water that was polluted with a chemical degreaser and a dry cleaning solvent that might be carcinogens -- and two other chemicals, benzene and vinyl chloride, that definitely are. Camp Lejeune is a Superfund site now, listed for a hazardous waste cleanup.
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