A report released Saturday by the National Research Council and National Academy of Science is "blasphemy," according to Jerry Ensminger, a retired Marine whose 9-year-old daughter died of leukemia.

According to the report, titled "Contaminated Water Supplies at Camp Lejeune Assessing Potential Health Effects," there is not sufficient evidence to link contaminants in Camp Lejeune water from the mid-1950s to mid-1980s to specific health conditions.

"This report completely downplays the exposure," Ensminger told the NRC panel at the Jacksonville USO Saturday.

Of Ensminger's four children, this child was the only one born aboard Camp Lejeune, he said.

Two water-supply systems on Camp Lejeune - Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point - were contaminated with the industrial solvents trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) from the mid-1950s until the mid-1980s, when the supply wells were shut down.

Terry Dyer drove from Wilmington to attend Saturday's briefing on the report because. She lived on Camp Lejeune from 1958 to 1973 where her father worked as a principal. He died of a sudden heart attack at age 45. Dyer has bladder cancer and other health problems, and members of her family have been "sick for years," she said.

"Would you allow this in your family's drinking water?" she asked the panel, all of which responded they wouldn't. "I have bladder cancer ... I trusted what I was drinking was safe."

According to the report, the committee concluded that there's no "scientific justification" for the Navy and Marine Corps to wait for additional health studies before making decisions about how to follow up.

"This is outrageous. We don't need to do more studies, they need to help these people," she said.

Robert Lathrop, a retired Chief Petty Officer who attended the brief for a friend who lived on Camp Lejeune during the 1980s, agreed with the conclusions.

"I know a little about medicine, about disease," he said. "These people did their job. They came up with adequate conclusions based on their study."

Lathrop said people with diseases that they think are related to the contaminated water "should not be compensated," because facts known now were not known during that time.

 "I go by knowledge," he said. "If you don't know what happened before, you can't understand what's happening today."

Lathrop served in Vietnam and Desert Storm, was around when Agent Orange was being used and has experienced many symptoms that doctors "could not find a reason for," but his stance on that is "oh well."

"You can't deny what took place but you have to accept it," Lathrop said. "Stuff happens."

Contact Amanda Hickey at 910-219-8461 or ahickey@freedomenc.com. Read the Lejeune Deployed blog at http://lejeunedeployed.freedomblogging.com.