(Army Times) Editorial: Pentagon must recognize burn-pit health hazards

[unhappycamper]

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 bio-environmental 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 widespread use at combat-zone installations.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/community/opinion/army_editorial_burnpit_110308/%2e