Still fighting Vietnam vets seek help for rare cancer

Still fighting Vietnam vets seek help for rare cancer As yet battling: Vietnam vets look for help for uncommon disease DANVILLE, Calif. — They were the fortunate ones who figured out how to make it home from Vietnam. Presently, a half-century later, a few veterans are discovering they, as well, are casualties of the war. The adversary is a known executioner in parts of Asia: Parasites ingested in crude or inadequately cooked waterway angle. These liver flukes connect to the covering of the bile conduit and, after some time, cause irritation and scarring. Decades after contamination, an uncommon growth called cholangiocarcinoma can create. Indications commonly don't happen until cutting edge stages. Ralph Erickson, who heads post-arrangement wellbeing administrations at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in regards to 700 cholangiocarcinoma patients have gone through the office's medicinal framework in the previous 15 years. In a few cases, the legislature has recognized that the disease is "as likely as not" associated with veterans' opportunity in administration. By VA principles, no more to make them qualified for advantages. Not as much as half of those 700 submitted claims, in any case, to some extent since they were uninformed of any conceivable connection to benefit. Of the cases submitted, 3 out of 4 have been rejected, by acquired by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act. Therefore, a few veterans are spending their last days battling the VA. They say they were never told they could be at hazard, despite the fact that they were conveyed to a district where the worms are endemic. "Difficult to accept," said veteran Michael Baughman, 64, as he sat in his parlor in Danville, Calif., flipping through a photograph collection from his war days. "I avoided every one of those slugs, then get murdered by a fish."