Frustrated Bay Area veterans descend on 'Fix-it' event

Frustrated Bay Area veterans descend on 'Fix-it' event
By Gary Peterson
Contra Costa Times
Posted:05/22/2012

SAN FRANCISCO -- Chris Munich was part of the military force that invaded Iraq in 2003, which within nine months had toppled Iraq's government.

Munich has been waiting almost two years for the Oakland Veterans Affairs office to consider his request to upgrade the rating on his disability for post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I've been rated 35 percent for PTSD," said Munich, 30, who lives at his parents' home in Oakland while pursuing a career as a chef. "It took them six months to get me paperwork. It just seems like a big circus. It doesn't seem like anybody's held accountable."
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Deadly infection claims San Francisco VA lab worker

Deadly infection claims San Francisco VA lab worker

By Matt O'Brien
Bay Area News Group
Posted: 05/03/2012

State and federal health officials are investigating how a rare and virulent bacteria strain appears to have killed a young researcher at a VA hospital's infectious diseases lab in San Francisco, setting off alarms that the man's friends and fellow researchers may have also been exposed.

The 25-year-old laboratory researcher at San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center died Saturday morning shortly after asking friends to take him to the hospital. For the week and months before his death, he had been handling a bacteria linked to deadly bloodstream infections at the VA hospital's Northern California Institute for Research and Education, said Peter Melton, a spokesman for the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The man, whose name has not been released, was working with fellow researchers to develop a vaccine for a bacterial strain that causes septicemia and meningitis. Hours after he left work, however, the germ that he was studying took his own life.

"He left the lab around 5 p.m." Friday, said Harry Lampiris, chief of the VA hospital's infectious diseases division. "He had no symptoms at all."
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Many veterans in San Francisco back home without a hope

Many veterans in San Francisco back home without a hope
By: Mike Aldax
August 8, 2010

Many return home with post-trauma symptoms, a debilitating injury and an inability to readjust to normalcy after leaving for war as a child and returning as an adult. Some turn to suicide — a recent Veterans Affairs report revealed that as many as 18 veterans try to take their own lives each day in the U.S. Seven percent of those attempts are successful and 11 percent of those will try again within nine months, the report said.

Kevin Crane wants to be perfectly clear: He doesn’t have one bad comment about the U.S. military.

The 33-year-old veteran said he knew very well what he signed up for when he joined the U.S. Army after 9/11. He said he is proud of the brave souls who protect their country. Salutes are in order, he said.

Even though Crane left the service with a back injury, the responsibility to care for his kids while his ex-wife was serving in Iraq — and the struggle of competing in a tight job market — the vet, who recently emerged from homelessness in The City, refuses to badmouth the armed forces.

“There’s an old saying, ‘If the military wants you to have a family, they’d issue you one,’” Crane said.

Frank Knowlton will not talk trash, either. At 61, he still waves the American flag proudly.


Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: Many veterans in San Francisco back home without a hope

Dr. Karen Seal taking PTSD in new direction

Karen Seal and her colleagues worked to get a new clinic in San Francisco for Iraq war vets. (Chronicle photo by Michael Macor)

Waiting room fills with young vets

Meredith May
Chronicle Staff Writer



Four years after the start of the war in Iraq, Dr. Karen Seal took a job at the San Francisco VA Medical Center to work in the liver clinic, treating patients with hepatitis C.

She noticed the veterans in the waiting room. Most of them were from the Vietnam era, in their 60s and older.

But over the months, the faces began to get younger. The waiting room was starting to fill with young men in their late teens and 20s, the first trickle of Bay Area soldiers emotionally and physically injured by the war.


Seal, a primary care physician, began working with them, taking their medical histories and directing them to the right care.

"At the time, I had never heard of PTSD," Seal said.

Now she knows how post-traumatic stress disorder contributes to the alcohol addiction and depression she sees in many of her patients.

She made referral after referral to the mental health wing of the VA hospital, but heard from colleagues that those initial patients never made it. It was too much of a stigma - especially in military culture - to walk across the campus to the mental health ward.

So Seal and colleagues got an idea. What if there were a special clinic just for Iraq war veterans that combined primary care and mental health checkups in a nonjudgmental setting?
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http://www.vawatchdog.org/08/nf08/nfMAR08/nf031708-3.htm