A U.S. Marine with the Warfighter Express Services Team assigned to Combat Logistics Regiment 2, walks away after disposing of trash at the burn pit at Forward Operating Base Zeebrugge, Helmand province, Afghanistan, March 6, 2013. Photo by Sgt. Anthony L. Ortiz.
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Chemistry grad When U.S. troops were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, they frequently disposed of garbage using burn pits – huge holes where they dumped everything from household trash to medical waste, doused it in jet fuel, and set it alight. “A lot of these pits were burning 24 hours a day, and they were located on or near the military installations where service members served,” said Rebecca Patterson, a Navy veteran and a UWM alum. “They inhaled this smoke all day long, and there was a lot of bad stuff in there.” Patterson was especially interested in one particular class of chemicals released in these burn pits: Dioxins, the same cancer-causing compounds found in Agent Orange from the Vietnam War era. She made them the topic of one of her final research papers at UWM. “That was my introduction to environmental exposures in the current war connected to environmental exposures in Vietnam,” Patterson said. “It made me realize that I wanted to study environmental health.” Now, as the assistant director of the Veteran’s Health Council, she gets to do just that. Working for veterans The Veterans Health Council is a program of the congressionally chartered veteran service organization Vietnam Veterans of America. The Council’s goal is to improve health care for veterans by educating service members, veterans, their families, and health care professionals about health issues associated with military service. For Patterson, that means keeping up with the science as information comes out about environmental exposures service members may have faced. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine are currently studying health effects from the burn pits, and they’ve recently turned their eyes toward another contaminant.
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“They’re starting to look into PFAS, which is a class of chemicals that has contaminated our water supply across the country,” Patterson said. “Several chemicals were, and others remain, a component of the aqueous film-forming foam that
