Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

When you consider how casually we used to use lead, it seems to be a miracle that more people weren’t killed. We used to use lead based paint. We used to put lead in our gasoline. There used to be toys made of lead. We can even remember a toy kit that was sold with lead and a miniature soldering gun that actually worked. Lead used to be used in the glass making process. Lead used to be part of practically everything we used.

In hindsight, we probably should have picked a better substance to work with, because lead is actually quite dangerous. The problem is that when you are surrounded by it, it is quite easy to ingest into your body. Lead is one of the softer metals, and it can very easily turn into dust. Particles can break away from larger pieces. And these particles can easily find their way into your food or water. And the results can be disastrous.

Lead interferes with body processes and is toxic to most of the organs in your body. And since it’s a heavy metal, once it is in your bloodstream it has a tendency to stay there. Lead can accumulate in your system over time, and the more you ingest into your body, the worse the effects can get. Heavy exposure to lead can cause severe impairment to mental development in children. At its most extreme levels, lead poisoning can kill you.

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The war in Vietnam seems occurred a long time ago. But for those who actually participated, we are willing to bet that they don’t view it as ancient history. There are still Vietnam veterans in America who have had difficulty coping with their experiences. Exposure to the extreme dangers of combat is not something that can be easily shrugged off. American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are proving that premise to still be true.

But the Vietnam War was different for a few reasons. Many veterans of that conflict brought back injuries that were neither psychological, nor were they of the sort that are consistent with combat. Many soldiers suffered from a disproportionately high rate of throat cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, prostate cancer and soft tissue sarcoma. Many of them found that their wives were suffering from miscarriages, or that their children were being born with birth defects.

To be sure, these things can and do happen to many people, regardless of whether they served in Vietnam or not, but it is worth noting that among Vietnam veterans who took part in a military effort named “Operation Ranch Hand,” the numbers of cancer and birth defects is incredibly high.

Operation Ranch Hand was the name given to a military program in which chemical herbicides and defoliants were sprayed over the jungles of Vietnam. The purpose of spraying these chemicals was to remove the habitat, cover and support system of the Viet Cong, and to force them into the cities, where the Vietnamese population was generally less supportive of the guerilla forces or North Vietnam in general. Between 1962 and 1971, over 20 million gallons of herbicides were sprayed over the jungles in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

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Most of you have probably heard of the saying “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Maryland can now try out a new version of that old adage, which is “Where the water turns green, it’s probably Fort Detrick.”

For those of you who don’t know, Fort Detrick is a military base in Frederick County, Maryland. As of right now it is the headquarters for the United States Army Medical Research Division, but it also had the rather dubious distinction of being the headquarters for our biological weapons research during and after World War II.

The various bits of detritus that came from years of biological weapons research and years of medical research ended up being tossed unceremoniously in a few landfills on the grounds of the Fort, which resulted in the whole area being placed on the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list. This has also allegedly resulted in the immediate surrounding area being known as a “cancer cluster,” which is what you call any area where there is a higher than normal cancer rate among the residents. It turns out that waste of any kind has a tendency to seep into the soil on which it is tossed. So while the folks at Ft. Detrick might have thought that simply placing a fence around a few acres of toxic waste might be enough to keep the surrounding environment safe from pollution, it is apparent that they did not consider the effects that groundwater pollution would have on the people who live in the surrounding areas.

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