Is the US Navy Killing Children
in Nevada?

Last June, Adam Jernee died from acute lymphocytic leukemia, a remorselessly fast-moving cancer of the blood. He was 8-years old and had fought the cancer for more than two years of his short life.

Adam and his father lived in Fallon, Nevada. This small ranching town of 8,000 people in the Carson Desert 50 miles east of Reno may have the highest per capita rate of childhood leukemia in the nation. The children of Fallon are more than 100 times more likely to be stricken with leukemia then children elsewhere in country.

Last week, another Fallon child was diagnosed with leukemia. That makes 17 kids from Fallon who have been contracted leukemia since 1997. Adam is the second child to have died within the past year. In September, Stephanie Sands succumbed to the cancer after battling it for two years. She was 21.

Cancer isn't the only problem. Kids and adults in Fallon and surrounding Churchill County are coming down with a myriad of other rare diseases, such as Myelodysplastic Syndrome and aplastic anemia. These diseases also relentlessly attack the bone marrow.

The kinds of cancers and other illnesses that have cropped up in the Fallon area are almost certainly caused by some kind of exposure to toxic chemicals. The source of that poison almost certainly sits a few miles outside the town of Fallon--somewhere on the 240,000-acre Fallon Naval Air Station, one of the Navy's largest bombing ranges, and home of the Top Gun fighter pilot training school.

But good luck to getting the Navy to take responsibility or even look very hard to find out what the problem might be. Years have passed and the Navy has done next to nothing, except deny culpability and try bully anyone who demands answers from naval brass. Apparently the Navy doesn't even care if the cancers are killing children of its own officers. The Navy has known about high levels of cancer among the children of Fallon workers and Navy officers since at least 1991; yet, the Pentagon has done little except try to conceal information on levels of pollution at the base and to stiff-arm investigators.

"Our frustration level is very high," says Brenda Gross, who 6-year old son has been sick with leukemia for two years. "This should have been found and stopped a long time ago. But you can't get anything out of the Navy."

Local residents think they know the answer: jet fuel spills and fuel dumping by Navy aircraft. JP-8 jet fuel, a combination of kerosene and benzene, is a known carcinogen and has been linked to leukemia and other bone marrow diseases.

The Navy has summarily ruled out jet fuel as a cause of the Fallon cancers, but records from the state of Nevada show that the Fallon air base has at least 26 toxic waste sites, 16 of them contaminated by jet fuel. Most of the Fallon area is playa, a dry lakebed over shallow groundwater. According to the Geological Survey, several distinct plumes of jet fuel have entered the water table beneath the air base.