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Pentagon must recognize burn-pit health hazards

More than five years into the war in Iraq and seven years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military continues daily disposal of hundreds of tons of war-zone waste in the most crude and hazardous manner — in open-air burn pits.

Troops with little more protection than cheap dust masks have fed the flames with plastic, rubber and petroleum products; unexploded ordnance; paints and solvents; and even medical waste such as bloody bandages and amputated limbs.

The list of toxins that can be produced in burn-pit smoke plumes is alarming — arsenic, benzene, carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid and dioxin, the cancer-causing main ingredient in the defoliant Agent Orange, among others.

One Air Force officer overseeing bioenvironmental concerns at Joint Base Balad, the largest U.S. installation in Iraq and home to more than 30,000 American personnel, said the burn pit there posed an “acute health hazard.”

The around-the-clock burn pits are perhaps suitable to a military on the march, a temporary solution when no other short-term options exist. By now, however, clean-burning incinerators and other, safer methods should be in wide use at combat-zone installations.

Yet a lack of priority and funding has kept efforts to build incinerators at U.S. bases in the war zones at a crawl, with fewer than 20 operating in Iraq today.

Three have been built at Balad, but that’s not enough; almost 150 tons of waste still gets dumped into the base’s burn pit every day.

Many troops assigned to Balad have blogged about the effects of exposure to the ever-present plume of smoke: stinging eyes, monster headaches, severe respiratory infections and “plume crud” — prolonged hacking that produces blackened phlegm and sometimes blood.

Seasoned, field-grade military medical professionals as well as civilian advisers to the Defense Health Board have raised concerns over unrestricted operation of burn pits, saying the smoke represents “acute and chronic” health hazards.

A technician with the Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine flatly labeled the Balad burn pit the “worst environmental site I have personally visited.”

But as has so often been the case across the decades on deployment health issues — anthrax vaccine, Gulf War illness, Agent Orange, secret biological training exercises, atomic bomb tests — the official line from the top is to deny that there’s a problem.

The Pentagon’s stance, reiterated as recently as August, is that while burn pit smoke may cause temporary coughing and eye iritation, “extensive environmental monitoring indicates that smoke exposures not interfering with breathing or requiring medical treatment at the time of exposure usually do not cause any lasting health effects or medical follow-up.”

But what about those who do have problems at the time of exposure? How are they assessed and treated? Are health records being annotated in case problems arise down the road? Is there a plan for follow-up care?

And why has incinerator construction been allowed to languish so badly for so long?

When Congress returns to work next year, it must press defense officials and new U.S. Central Command chief Army Gen. David Petraeus on these questions.

Let’s hope it’s not too late to keep open-air burn pits from becoming the next chapter in the Pentagon’s sordid history of medical scandals.