She Served Her Country. It Raised Her Cancer Risk.
87% higher risk of melanoma and 16% higher risk of breast and colorectal cancers
The base was beautiful, which is the part people never expect. It sat around a lake, ringed by palaces. If you have ever seen a photo of someone sitting on Saddam Hussein’s throne, it was probably taken there. Laura Pearson deployed early in the Iraq War, and every day she walked through a haze of black smoke to reach work, the chow hall, an errand. An older friend warned her not to go out when the smoke was heavy. Laura was young, and she loved to run, so she ran in it.
The smoke came from burn pits: open-air pits, sometimes acres wide, where the military incinerated everything a war produces, plastics and medical waste and electronics and fuel. Studies of deployed veterans have found foreign particulate lodged in lung tissue, including silica and titanium oxides. Laura does not know exactly what she breathed. Almost twenty years later, she felt a lump.
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Laura had a reason. Most of the people I talk to on Kicking Cancer’s Ass never get one. They ask “why me” and the honest answer is nobody knows. Laura’s cancer has a cause with a paper trail, a federal law, and a registry. And the medical system still made her fight to have it taken seriously.
The scale is bigger than one woman. In 2022 Congress passed the PACT Act, signed into law that August, which formally acknowledged the link between toxic exposures like burn pits and a long list of illnesses, and let veterans get care without first proving their service caused the condition. Millions of veterans have since gone through the VA’s new toxic-exposure screening. The American Cancer Society notes that burn pit smoke and its particulate matter may raise the risk of several cancers. This is federal policy now.
