He is convinced: the testicular tumor that struck him was caused by his activities in missions abroad. Now the Tar has also established it, which has condemned the Ministry of Defense to ascertain the cause and effect link between service provided for the State and illness afflicting a former Sardinian soldier.

A (final?) victory at the end of a long legal battle, 10 years, carried out by the lawyer Angelo Fiore Tartaglia. The clash took place according to an established script.

There he is. The soldier falls ill, asks for damages from the state, the medical commission excludes all responsibility, without giving reasons for the decision. Thus begins the appeal. The administrative court, according to consolidated case law, establishes that to deny the causal link between work in territories where it is now undisputed that depleted uranium has been used on the one hand, and tumors among soldiers on the other, a thorough medical investigation is required. And everything is sent back to the military commission.

It happened here too. But there is one more step: the new evaluation was carried out with the same "depth" as the first. That is: it was superficial like the previous one. And this bad habit was crushed by the Tar of Sardinia , which forced us to proceed with a new consultation and to agree with the sick Sardinian soldier.

The graduate had undergone left orchifuniculectomy surgery for seminoma. He had participated in "numerous international peace missions in Kosovo (years 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2005), in Lebanon (year 2007), in Afghanistan (years 2009 and 2011) and Somalia (year 2014)". He had also declared that he "had moved aboard various types of vehicles in areas devastated by bombing, without being equipped with any means of protection (overalls, masks and gloves) in environments highly polluted by fumes and toxic residues deriving from combustion and oxidation of heavy metals caused by the impact and explosion of munitions used for military operations, including those using depleted uranium".

In 2014, he discovered that he had fallen ill. Since then he has fought, but against the State which wanted to deny him any compensation. Despite having won a first appeal, with the Tar which imposed the new verification in 2019, he was faced with a new denial.

For military doctors, the tumor that struck the soldier would be attributable to "unknown or unspecified factors, including" cryptorchidism, smoking, Klinefelter's syndrome, a family history with this tumor, exposure to pesticides and 'infertility', even though these risk factors are detached from the applicant's clinical and anamnestic history".

Unacceptable, for administrative judges. Which in recent days have established "the obligation for the administration to pronounce favorably on the applicant's request, acknowledging the existence of the cause of service, since the Ministry has already used the second possibility to exercise its discretion".

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