Moments after he landed in Los Angeles for his son’s wedding last year, Gilbert “Kip” Wyand said he vomited a gallon of blood in the airport parking lot.
Severe stomach pain, drenching night sweats and sudden body temperature changes soon followed. Two months later, in May, Wyand was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia — a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow that the National Cancer Institute says can be caused by radiation exposure.
The diagnosis confused him. At 57, he had been healthy his whole life, rarely even having a cold, and he had no family history of health issues. But the next month, as his son tried to make sense of his illness, he stumbled upon a newly published Navy report, outlining efforts to address radioactive materials that have contaminated the now-closed Long Beach Naval Shipyard in California for decades.
It was the first time Wyand, a Navy veteran who lived and worked at the shipyard in the late 1980s, learned he may have been exposed to radium-226 and strontium-90 — radionuclides that build up in the body over time and are linked to leukemia and other cancers.
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The Navy has known about multiple environmental contaminations at the base for more than 20 years. In 2008 it conducted a study that found radiation, then publicly documented for the first time in 2023 the detection of radiation involving levels of radium-226 and strontium-90. But the Navy had not alerted Wyand or any others to the potential exposure. A spokesperson said there is no mechanism in place to notify veterans of possible exposures after a base is no longer operational.
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