HELENA - Navy veteran John Olsen of Billings, who took part in top-secret chemical-weapons testing more than 40 years ago, has had skin cancer, prostate cancer and an adrenal tumor the size of his fist.

Olsen believes his health problems are linked to the chemicals and biological agents to which he and others were exposed on an Army tugboat in the Pacific Ocean during the tests.

Yet after years of trying to get the U.S. Department of Defense to acknowledge the link and provide information and health benefits to those subjected to the testing, Olsen and others, including U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, are still waiting. "They should identify and notify these people," Olsen said in a recent interview. "Now is the time when most of these people are getting the illnesses and having the effects. If we wait much longer, it's going to be too late to do anything for these people."

Rehberg, R-Mont., and Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., have worked on this obscure cause for more than six years now, introducing bills and pushing the Defense Department to come clean and provide health benefits for the 500 or so veterans involved in the Shipboard Hazard and Defense project, known by the acronym SHAD.

They hoped for a breakthrough this year with the completion of a

$1 million study of health effects among SHAD veterans conducted by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rehberg, Olsen and others thought it would identify health problems and give the Defense Department information needed to provide health benefits or other compensation for affected SHAD veterans.

But the study was woefully incomplete, Rehberg and others said.

It found no unusually high level of health effects among veterans in the testing project - but didn't include all the veterans subjected to the chemicals and biological agents on the tugboats, while including numerous veterans in the project but not subjected to the chemicals, they said.

"It was a very poorly done study," Rehberg said last week. "I was appalled that we spent over $1 million on a study that was incomplete. You feel like you wasted all the time and all the money on something that was just shoddy work."

Full Story: http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2007/12/16/news/mtregional/news08.txt