It’s been two years since Biden signed the burn pits bill into law. But sick veterans say the fight isn’t over

“The PACT Act didn’t just miraculously heal everyone. So there’s work to do,” Rosie Torres tells The Independent.

It’s now almost two years on from when President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act – the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022 – into law in August 2022.

And a major milestone has now been reached.

On Tuesday, the president announced that more than one million claims had been approved by the VA, giving more than 880,000 veterans and survivors access to much-needed healthcare and disability benefits.

“That matters because too many servicemembers” have been “breathing in toxic fumes” from burn pits, Mr Biden said in remarks from Nashua, New Hampshire.

Mr Biden described the pits as large as football fields, ten feet in depth and used for incinerating “all the wastes of war,” burning “everything from tires, to chemicals to jet fuel and so much more.”

From the pits, smoke would emanate, “thick with poison, spreading through the air and in the lungs of many thousands of troops who lived [and] worked near them.”

The president is convinced that exposure to burn pits in Iraq caused the brain cancer that killed his son Beau Biden in 2015.

“I pushed the PACT Act — so today’s veterans don’t suffer the same painful, frustrating delays and denials,” he said on Tuesday.

Like Beau Biden, thousands of US service members returned home from war sick and dying from rare cancers, respiratory conditions and other illnesses caused by their exposure to the toxins.

And for years, they fought in vain to get access to VA healthcare.

For Rosie and her husband Le Roy Torres, it was – and continues to be – a long fight

Mr Torres returned home from a tour of Iraq and began