Veterans who claim they were made sick from the toxic smoke emanating from burn pits on their military bases during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan won a small victory after the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it they will begin taking claims on presumptive conditions due to their service.<\/p>\n
Effective on Monday, the VA has begun processing disability claims for respiratory conditions like asthma, rhinitis and sinusitis on a presumptive basis. The processing of claims is based on presumed exposure to particulate matter during military service in the Southwest Asia theater of operations, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. the initiative comes after being announced this past May.<\/p>\n
“Through this process, I determined that the evidence provided was sufficient to establish presumptions of service connection for these three respiratory conditions,” Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough said in a released statement. “This is the right decision, and VA will continue to use a holistic approach in determining toxic exposure presumptives moving forward.”<\/p>\n
It was also announced by the department that will be conducting an outreach initiative to inform impacted veterans of their eligibility.<\/p>\n
The Investigative Unit at Fox News has reported extensively on the fears that veterans have been made sick by exposure to fumes from burn pits. Many soldiers said the pits were a crude method of incineration in which every piece of waste was burned, including plastics, batteries, appliances, medicine, dead animals and even human waste.<\/p>\n
The items often were set ablaze with jet fuel as the accelerant. The pits burned more than 1,000 different chemical compounds day and night. Most service members breathed in toxic fumes with no protection. According to a registry created by the VA, over 200,000 vets said the exposure made them ill, but the department denied assistance to many of them.<\/p>\n
Many veterans and their families have said that their experience trying to obtain assistance with health care coverage left them feeling as if they were being treated as if they were attempting to run a scam to obtain money from the federal government.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
More at the source.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many people were exposed to burn pits while in the sandbox and have had lingering, unexplained … VA finally accepting claims related to SW Asia service burn pits<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,126,86,118,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-disposable-warriors","category-veteran-health-care","category-veterans-issues","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116098,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116097\/revisions\/116098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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