Leukämie und verseuchtes Wasser --- Leukemia and toxic substances in water

Daughter’s death drives Marine’s long quest for answers about tainted water‏

January 11, 2011 posted by Chuck Palazzo

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — Janey Ensminger wanted to be known as the girl who lived. The 9-year-old lay in a North Carolina hospital room in 1985, her body broken by leukemia. Her mouth was covered in sores. Everything hurt.

By William R. Levesque, St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer
Janey had agreed to take an experimental drug. By doing so, she might help others. With a child’s bottomless store of optimism, she thought her recovery would be long remembered.
That was important to her. An aunt recalled Janey saying she “wanted to make a difference.”
Two weeks later, Janey died. Her dad, a tough Marine gunnery sergeant, cried by the bed.
Janey’s father, Jerry Ensminger, will visit Tampa on Saturday for a meeting of former Tampa Bay Marines, sailors and their families to tell Janey’s story and tell them something it took him years to accept.
Ensminger, 58, says his beloved Corps poisoned them.
The former Marine says Janey’s death is linked to tainted water at Camp Lejeune, N.C. And for more than a decade, Ensminger has become the public face of what may be one of the worst drinking water contaminations in the nation’s history.
For 30 years ending in 1987, up to 1 million people drank, bathed and cooked with the base’s water, which was polluted with a stew of cancer-causing chemicals.
Ensminger is something of a force of nature who served nearly 25 years in the Corps and trained recruits as a drill instructor at Parris Island, S.C.
Some credit him with doing more than anyone to raise awareness of pollution at Camp Lejeune. He has testified three times before Congress. He has given hundreds of media interviews.
In 2010, a bill was introduced in Congress to provide medical help for ill Lejeune veterans and family members. It was titled the Janey Ensminger Act.
“Jerry’s one of the most effective advocates for exposed communities I’ve ever seen in my 40 years of public health work,” said Dick Clapp, professor emeritus of environmental health at Boston University.
That federal scientists are today studying whether base water caused health problems is, in part, a testament to Ensminger’s tenacity, Clapp said.
In a sense, a father gave his daughter her one last wish.
Janey did make difference.

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http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/01/11/daughter%E2%80%99s-death-drives-marine%E2%80%99s-long-quest-for-answers-about-tainted-water%E2%80%8F/