Contaminated water at military bases and cancer risk

This page is for people who lived or worked at Camp Lejeune, and their families. It explains what the large federal study of the base's water found about cancer.

At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the drinking water was contaminated with industrial chemicals. The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) says this began in the early 1950s. The most contaminated wells were shut down in 1985. That is roughly three decades. During those years people trained there, worked there, raised families there and drank the tap water.

Four contaminants sit at the center of the research. ATSDR says the water at one treatment plant (Hadnot Point) was contaminated mainly by TCE (trichloroethylene). At another (Tarawa Terrace) it was mainly PCE (tetrachloroethylene), from an off-base dry cleaner. Benzene and vinyl chloride were also present.

The strongest thing about this research is how it was set up.

Researchers took 154,821 people from Camp Lejeune and 163,484 from Camp Pendleton in California. All were present between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s. Camp Pendleton served as the comparison. It was a large military population living a broadly similar life, but without the contaminated water.

That structure matters. Military populations share a lot, such as job hazards, medical care and age range. Comparing one base with another, instead of with the general public, helps account for that shared background.

ATSDR calls it one of the largest studies of its type done in the United States. The team used cancer registry data from all 50 states, plus several federal databases. ATSDR says outside experts reviewed it before it was published in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Among Marines and Navy personnel at Camp Lejeune, researchers saw increased risk for leukemia and lymphoma. They also saw it for cancers of the lung, breast, larynx, esophagus, thyroid and soft tissues.

Among civilian workers at the base, the increases showed up for myeloid cancers (cancers of certain blood-forming cells) and for some cancers of the breast and lung.

ATSDR sums the whole exercise up this way. Increased risk of several cancers was observed among Marines and civilian workers exposed to the contaminated drinking water, compared with the unexposed group at Camp Pendleton.

A study of hundreds of thousands of people measures rates in groups. It cannot reach back and explain one person's diagnosis.

This is not a technicality, and it is not a brush-off. Someone who served at the base and later got a cancer on that list is understandably sure of the connection. But statistics do not work at the level of one person. They say how often something happened across a population, and then they stop.

What the evidence does support is treating the exposure as a documented public health event. Federal agencies now do exactly that.

Pin down your dates. Which years you were there, and in what role, is the single most useful fact you can nail down. Old records are easier to find now than later.

Get it written into your medical record. A doctor seeing you for the first time in ten years will not know unless it is in the chart.

Ask the VA directly about care tied to this exposure. Do not piece it together from forums. Benefit and eligibility rules are administrative questions with real answers, and the people who run them are the right source.

Keep any routine screening you are due for on schedule. Nothing here replaces the ordinary checks for your age. This is a reason to keep them, not to swap them for something else.

Families lived on base too. ATSDR says the exposure affected residents, including infants and children, as well as civilian workers, Marines and Navy personnel. The cancer study described here covered Marines, Navy personnel and civilian workers.

So the exposure history is worth passing around a family. That goes double for adult children who were there young and remember none of it. A fact nobody mentions cannot end up in anyone's medical record. This one is worth mentioning.