Hundreds of thousands more U.S. service members exposed to toxic forever chemicals than DOD acknowledges, report finds
The Department of Defense (DOD) has underestimated how many U.S. service members were exposed to potentially unsafe levels of forever chemicals in the drinking water served on military installations, a new report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has found.
While the DOD put the number of exposed service members at 175,000 a year at 24 bases, the EWG said the number was closer to more than 600,000 at 116 military installations.
“The Department of Defense is trying to downplay these risks rather than aggressively seeking to notify service members and clean up its legacy pollution,” EWG senior vice president of government affairs Scott Faber told The Guardian. “It has [a] long history of looking the other way when it comes to PFAS pollution.”
