VA to study whether military toxic exposures are tied to veterans cancers, illnesses
The Department of Veterans Affairs will launch a major study into military exposure to toxic environments to get a better understanding of whether there is a connection to cancers and other diseases afflicting service members, the agency’s chief research officer said Wednesday.
Rachel Ramoni, the chief research and development officer for the VA, said despite generations of men and women returning home from serving in wars overseas to face cancer diagnoses at home, the agency has not yet devoted resources to discover the root causes.
“I’ve been speaking a lot with [Vietnam veterans] in particular, and they, I think, for good reason, have been irritated with us as an organization because we have not done a lot of work, especially clinical work on military exposures,” she said.
Ramoni was speaking at a conference on veterans prostate cancer rates sponsored by ZERO — The End of Prostate Cancer. The group has reported that veterans are twice as likely to have prostate cancer as the general population, with more than 489,000 veterans currently getting treated for prostate cancer within the VA health care system.
Ramoni said that as a result of conversations with hundreds of veterans to help shape the study, the agency will also be looking at the impact on veterans’ kids, and whether toxic exposure while serving is connected to birth defects in their children.
“It’s very hard to hear stories from veterans who bear the feeling of guilt that their daughter, and this is one veteran I spoke to, their daughter had a hysterectomy at age three and wondering if it was because of his service,” she said.
Ramoni said that she has apologized to the Vietnam veterans groups for the lack of previous research. “I have committed that in [fiscal year] 2021 we’re going to make major investments in toxic exposure. We are in the planning phases for that now, but in FY 2021 we will start to roll that out. That’s something that will cut across all our research.”
Last month in an exclusive investigation, McClatchy reported that the rates of treatment at VA health care centers for many types of cancers rose sharply over the last two decades of war. Treatment rates for urinary cancers — which include bladder, ureter and kidney cancers — have jumped 61 percent from fiscal year 2000 to 2018. Prostate cancer treatment rates have risen 23 percent.
Veterans groups and their families question whether the various toxic exposures that service members encountered while in the military are to blame. Some of those exposures include massive trash burning pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, where everything from ammunition, tires, computer parts and human waste was burned. They have also expressed concerns about cancer-linked firefighting foam the military used and possible exposure to radiation in the cockpits of the aircraft they flew.
But little research has been done to date on whether the cancers veterans are facing now are tied to those exposures.
Specifically for prostate cancer, “we don’t have a clear answer why,” Ramoni said. “I think it’s clear that Agent Orange alone can’t be the explanation because that affects one era of service. But in general, cancer is more common in VA across the board than it is in the U.S. general population.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2019 at 5:45 PM.
