Comedian Jon Stewart and troops sickened by uranium ended a meeting Friday at the Department of Veterans Affairs angry that once again they have been told they will have to wait to see whether the VA will connect their illnesses to the toxic base where they were deployed shortly after 9/11. The denied claims were supposed to have been fixed by the PACT Act, a major veterans aid package bill that President Joe Biden signed in 2022 and said is one of his proudest accomplishments in office. For many veterans it has made access to care much easier.
But the bill left out the the uranium exposure that's still hurting some of the very first troops deployed in response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The information you need to know, sent directly to you: Download the CTV News App Just weeks after the attacks, special operations forces were sent to Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan, or K2, a badly contaminated former Soviet base that was a strategic location for launching operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But K2 was a former chemical weapons site and was littered with yellow powdered uranium that was kicked up in the dust and moved throughout the base when the military pushed up a protective earth berm. The radiation levels were as much as 40,000 times higher than what would have been found naturally, according to a nuclear fusion expert who has reviewed the data. Two decades later, troops who served there are still fighting to get radiation-exposure illnesses recognized by .