Camp Lejeune Contamination Victims Include Thousands in Florida

Thousands in Florida potential victims of Marine camp contamination 
Orlando Sentinel
By Elyssa Cherney
March 21, 2015

Christina Peach, 39, was diagnosed with stage 1 kidney cancer last year. Peach, who was born on the Marine base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, attributes her illness to contaminated groundwater she may have consumed while living nearby in 1975. Her father , Michael Hightower also died
(Tom Benitez, Orlando Sentinel)

Christina Peach's parents welcomed a seemingly healthy baby into the world in 1975 at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Camp Lejeune, the North Carolina base where her father was stationed as a Marine sergeant.

Seven years later, a chemical consulting company found that water from the emergency-room sink contained 1,400 parts per billion of trichloroethylene — 280 times its regulatory limit for drinking water today — which "has been reported to produce liver and kidney damage and central nervous system disturbances in humans," according to a memo from Grainger Laboratories in 1982.

Peach, 39, who now lives in Mount Dora, believes the water she was exposed to in utero and as an infant is responsible for the kidney cancer she developed last year and for her father's premature death.

Doctors discovered the mass growing on her right kidney when she got a CT scan for appendicitis in January 2014. Her father, Michael Hightower, 61, died 10 months later from lung cancer that had spread to his brain, bladder and bones, she said.
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