DOD It is a World Trade Center in slow motion. —DAVID OZONOFF, EPIDEMIOLOGIST, BOSTON UNIVERSITY When the industrial cleaning solvent trichloroethylene was found in Camp Lejeune’s water supply in 1980, toxicologists had a pretty good idea that TCE was a killer even if ingested at small doses. Government studies compiled that year in a handbook of toxic chemicals concluded that the widely used degreaser causes liver cancer, “attacks the heart, liver, kidneys, central nervous system and skin,” and can be especially damaging to developing fetuses and young children. The effects of TCE on children were dramatically illustrated in 1981 when the Massachusetts Department of Public Health published a report saying that in the industrial city of Woburn, where drinking water was laced with TCE in the 1960s and 1970s, “the incidence of childhood leukemia was significantly elevated,” with a dozen observed cases at that time in a community of only 35,000 people.1 A decade later, when the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry began investigating whether people had been harmed by chemicals in Camp Lejeune’s water, even more was known about the dangers of TCE and its sister compound, the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene, or PCE.
