By MIKE STOBBE
NEW YORK (AP) — Military workers stationed at Camp Lejeune from 1975 to 1985 had at least a 20% greater danger for a number of cancers than those stationed inotherplaces, federal health authorities stated Wednesday in a long-awaited researchstudy about the North Carolina base’s polluted drinking water.
Federal health authorities called the researchstudy one the biggest ever done in the United States to evaluate cancer threat by comparing a group who live and worked in a contaminated environment to a comparable group that did not.
The researchstudy discovered military workers stationed at U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune were at greater danger for some types of leukemia and lymphoma and cancers of the lung, breast, throat, esophagus and thyroid. Civilians who worked at the base likewise were at a greater danger for a muchshorter list of cancers.
The researchstudy is “quite outstanding,” however cannot count as last evidence that the polluted drinking water triggered the cancers, stated David Savitz, a Brown University illness scientist who is consulting for complainants’ lawyers in Camp Lejeune-related lawsuits.
“This is not something we’re going to be able to willpower definitively,” he stated. “We are talking about directexposures that tookplace (decades earlier) that were not well recorded.”
But he stated the brand-new researchstudy will include weight to arguments made on behalf of individuals who got ill after living and working at the base.
Camp Lejeune was developed in a sandy pine forest along the North Carolina coast in the early 1940s. Its drinking water was infected with commercial solvents from the early 1950s to1985 The contamination — spotted in the early 1980s — was blamed on a badly kept