FL man with breast cancer: Possible link to 30-year water contamination at Camp Lejeune, NC [View All]

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The answers may come from an ongoing study of contaminated water at a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, where Mike Partain was born almost 40 years ago. ..... Partain, 39, has breast cancer.
..... The American Cancer Society predicts 2,030 cases will be diagnosed in men this year. That's miniscule compared with 178,480 expected in women, although just as life threatening.

Partain's doctors expected to discover he had mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, he said, which increase the risk of breast cancer. But he didn't have that abnormality, making his breast cancer all the more unusual. "Statistically I shouldn't have this," said Partain, who lived in Polk County most of his life before moving to Tallahassee last year.

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Partain had a mastectomy May 4 in Tallahassee, where he is a claims adjuster for State Farm Insurance.
He will get chemotherapy there through Nov. 19 and follow-up care at Shands Medical Center at the University of Florida.
"I was asking myself why and how," Partain said during an interview at his parents' Winter Haven home. "There's no history in my family. I don't drink or smoke."

A possible answer came in June when national news coverage highlighted an extensive investigation into water supplies at Camp Lejeune, the sprawling Marine base in Jacksonville, N.C.
Government health experts say water at the base was contaminated for a 30-year period starting in 1957.

Ongoing investigations aim to determine whether Camp Lejeune's water was responsible for a higher rate of birth defects and cancer in children conceived and born there during that period. Federal officials are considering whether tougher restrictions are needed on two solvents - TCE, trichloroethylene, and PERC, tetrachloroethylene - that tainted the water supply.
The focus is on children diagnosed before age 20, Partain said. But adults who have unusual cancers, as he has, also are starting to question whether their illnesses are linked to contaminated water.
Chemicals from a dry cleaner adjacent to Camp Lejeune and from industrial activities at the base are being blamed for the contamination.

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At least 850 former residents have filed suit against the military. Partain isn't among them, but he has done research and contacted U.S. representatives' offices.
"I'm waiting to see what the Marines do," he said. "It upsets me they didn't do what they were supposed to do and notify families."
The Marine Corps hasn't told his parents, Warren and Lisette Partain, about the potential risk, he said.

Warren Partain learned through a June article in The Ledger and reports on CNN. He called his son.
"He said the wells were contaminated for 30 years," Mike Partain said. "It literally took the breath out of me. I started shaking."
Partain's mother was at Camp Lejeune throughout her pregnancy. He was born there on Jan. 30, 1968, and lived there until his father went to Vietnam in May 1968.
"There's no doubt in my mind this happened to me in embryo," he said.
As someone without BRCA mutation, his risk of male breast cancer was less than 1 percent, according to information given him by the genetic lab that tested him for that abnormality.

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Two Tallahassee-area families have called him since an article about him ran in the Tallahassee Democrat. One had a daughter, conceived at Camp Lejeune in 1975, who got a brain cancer. A woman who was pregnant there in the early 1970s said a son born there had a skin rash similar to his, he said.
"There needs to be notification to everyone who was there," Partain said. "I want to see them doing a lifetime study."