COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown is leading a push to help veterans who may have been exposed to toxic chemicals in burn pits while serving overseas.
Those veterans — and their families — said their claims for healthcare have been denied because of difficulty in proving their illness was caused by their service.
“I have five different lung diseases, including constrictive bronchiolitis obliterans from my toxic exposure to the burn pits,” Andrea Nuetzling, an Army veteran from Syracuse, Ohio, said. “I have to fight every day to make sure I’m not exposed to anything that could actually make my lungs flair up.”
An increasing number of veterans like Nuetzling said the health problems they face today were caused by breathing in the pollution from burn pits.
“The one on Camp Bucca was probably about the size of a football field and they would line it up with all the trash from the base and light it up with jet fuel,” Nuetzling said. “We had medical waste, we had rubber tires, we had metal. Metal doesn’t burn. Lithium-ion batteries. The reason for burning it was, basically, to keep things from falling into the enemy’s hands.”
Danielle Robinson says her husband, Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson, was in the best shape of his life just a few years ago, preparing for Army Ranger school, when he was suddenly hit with fatigue and constant nose bleeds.
Danielle pushed him to go to a doctor, who found a diagnosis — stage 4 lung cancer.
“The first thing he said to us was, ‘What have you been exposed to? Your cancer is presenting as a toxic exposure start, and unfortunately, you’re so far progressed that you’re terminal, and you have four to six weeks to live.’” Robinson said. “This was 2017. He was deployed to Iraq in 2006 and 2007, so this was ten years later after his deployment.”
In trying to find care, veterans and their families are running into a problem.
The delay between their exposure and when their symptoms or illnesses present has some of their care being delayed or outright denied, unable to prove their ailments are connected to their service.
“His approval to get imaging would be delayed for the oncologist, they were denying medications he needed to make him comfortable, and then I was denied caregiver benefits by the Columbus VA,” Robinson said.
“It took me almost four years of fighting the VA for them to say ‘Yes, your respiratory issues are from the burn pits,’” Nuetzling said.
Doctors at The Ohio State University are working to prove the connection between burn pits and medical issues by exposing mice to the same pollution.
“Three to four weeks (exposure in mice) is around a year in a human. We know there may be long effects of burn pit exposure. These are a rather new thing, so they’ve only been around since early 2000 so we don’t know what the long term effects are in soldiers,” Dr. Loren Wold, Associate Dean of Research Operations and Compliance at Ohio State’s College of Medicine, said.
“The heart is compromised, lungs are compromised, as well as now really, the newer areas, the development of neurodegenerative diseases,” Wold said.
President Biden shared part of Heath and Danielle’s story during his first State of the Union Address earlier this month while also suggesting a potential, personal connection to the effects burn pits can have on families.
“When they came home, many of the world’s fittest and best trained warriors were never the same. Headaches. Numbness. Dizziness. A cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin. I know. One of those soldiers…
Read More: Sen. Brown urges Congress to aid burn pit victims, family members