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Authors: Mike Magner
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his wife appeared to have been harmed even though they had been exposed to the same pollution. âEach person has different genetic coding and some are affected, others not,â Gros said. âSome are resistant, some not.â
In the spring of 2002, Gros was advised that he needed to prepare for a bone marrow transplant. His son Tom turned out to be almost a perfect match, and he agreed to take a break from his studies at Texas A&M University to be his fatherâs donor. The procedure, in which marrow from both of Tomâs hip bones was transplanted into his father, was done in May 2002. Mike Gros was fifty years old and praying for a new lease on life.
Around the same time that Gros was battling leukemia in Texas,three daughters of Joan and Eddie Lewis, who had lived at Camp Lejeune as babies or toddlers in the late 1960s, were having serious and unusual health problems, too. Now adults in North Carolina, the sisters had spent the years from 1966 to 1970 in three different homes in the Tarawa Terrace area while Eddie was doing two tours of duty in Vietnam. Those years were marked by frequent visits to the clinic for respiratory issues among the girls, but nothing as serious as what they would experience several decades later. One would have a baseball-sized uterine tumor discovered as she was delivering a baby girl; another underwent emergency surgery to remove more than a dozen noncancerous tumors from her uterus; and another would have half her lung removed because of a rare illness. And their younger brother, who had been born with two vertebrae fused together a year after his mother left Camp Lejeune, had been living for years with chronic back pain and headaches. In 2000âthree years after the ATSDR report was completedâJoan Lewis read a newspaper article about the water contamination at Camp Lejeune extending over several decades, including the years her family lived there. She went online and requested information from the ATSDR , only to find when the packet arrived that every one of her children had experienced one or two of the symptoms listed as possible effects from the contaminants. Now convinced there was a connection between the water at Camp Lejeune and her familyâs array of health problems, Joan Lewis filed a claim for compensation with the Marine Corps in 2001. In 2013, she was still waiting for a response. 2
The year 2000 brought similar revelations to others. Louella Holliday, whose baby conceived at Camp Lejeune died just hours after his birth in 1973, saw a news report about the baseâs water problems. âI was watching TV getting ready to go to work and heard about Camp Lejeune and contaminated water,â Hollidaysaid. âI didnât catch the whole report, so I went to work and looked it up on the Internet. All the sites directed me to ATSDR . I had no idea what that was. . . . A lot of information came in the mail. Thatâs when I finally realized, it wasnât me.â Not only did she and her husband lose a child after living at Camp Lejeune, but Louella lost the good health she had enjoyed as a girl and young woman. âIâve been through a whole plethora of ailments,â she said. âItâs easier to say what I havenât had.â The more she learned about the poisoned waterâand the fact that the Marines had failed to inform her about itâthe angrier Holliday became. âI could not imagine that Marine Corps officials had knowledge of this contamination for so many years without divulging it to the masses that had been adversely affected by it,â she wrote on a website for victims of the base pollution. 3
A report in 2000 on CNN about the contamination led Terry Dyer and her sister, Karen Strand, to ask for information from the ATSDR . They instantly saw a possible link with the sudden death of their father, John Fristoe, in 1973 at the age of forty-five, after he had worked for fifteen years as principal of an
In the spring of 2002, Gros was advised that he needed to prepare for a bone marrow transplant. His son Tom turned out to be almost a perfect match, and he agreed to take a break from his studies at Texas A&M University to be his fatherâs donor. The procedure, in which marrow from both of Tomâs hip bones was transplanted into his father, was done in May 2002. Mike Gros was fifty years old and praying for a new lease on life.
Around the same time that Gros was battling leukemia in Texas,three daughters of Joan and Eddie Lewis, who had lived at Camp Lejeune as babies or toddlers in the late 1960s, were having serious and unusual health problems, too. Now adults in North Carolina, the sisters had spent the years from 1966 to 1970 in three different homes in the Tarawa Terrace area while Eddie was doing two tours of duty in Vietnam. Those years were marked by frequent visits to the clinic for respiratory issues among the girls, but nothing as serious as what they would experience several decades later. One would have a baseball-sized uterine tumor discovered as she was delivering a baby girl; another underwent emergency surgery to remove more than a dozen noncancerous tumors from her uterus; and another would have half her lung removed because of a rare illness. And their younger brother, who had been born with two vertebrae fused together a year after his mother left Camp Lejeune, had been living for years with chronic back pain and headaches. In 2000âthree years after the ATSDR report was completedâJoan Lewis read a newspaper article about the water contamination at Camp Lejeune extending over several decades, including the years her family lived there. She went online and requested information from the ATSDR , only to find when the packet arrived that every one of her children had experienced one or two of the symptoms listed as possible effects from the contaminants. Now convinced there was a connection between the water at Camp Lejeune and her familyâs array of health problems, Joan Lewis filed a claim for compensation with the Marine Corps in 2001. In 2013, she was still waiting for a response. 2
The year 2000 brought similar revelations to others. Louella Holliday, whose baby conceived at Camp Lejeune died just hours after his birth in 1973, saw a news report about the baseâs water problems. âI was watching TV getting ready to go to work and heard about Camp Lejeune and contaminated water,â Hollidaysaid. âI didnât catch the whole report, so I went to work and looked it up on the Internet. All the sites directed me to ATSDR . I had no idea what that was. . . . A lot of information came in the mail. Thatâs when I finally realized, it wasnât me.â Not only did she and her husband lose a child after living at Camp Lejeune, but Louella lost the good health she had enjoyed as a girl and young woman. âIâve been through a whole plethora of ailments,â she said. âItâs easier to say what I havenât had.â The more she learned about the poisoned waterâand the fact that the Marines had failed to inform her about itâthe angrier Holliday became. âI could not imagine that Marine Corps officials had knowledge of this contamination for so many years without divulging it to the masses that had been adversely affected by it,â she wrote on a website for victims of the base pollution. 3
A report in 2000 on CNN about the contamination led Terry Dyer and her sister, Karen Strand, to ask for information from the ATSDR . They instantly saw a possible link with the sudden death of their father, John Fristoe, in 1973 at the age of forty-five, after he had worked for fifteen years as principal of an
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