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"  One of my first beats as a\u00A0reporter for an alternative newspaper in Boston was to cover the various issues of concern to the Vietnam veterans community in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was when the federal government\u2014and the traditional vets groups, damn them\u2014were stonewalling the Vietnam guys and calling them losers and claiming that PTSD was a coward&amp;#039;s dodge to get on the federal\u00A0dole. (I heard all of these arguments. It is largely lost to history that the people who took the Vietnam veterans and their issues seriously were elements of what had been the antiwar movement\u2014the people who ran the GI coffeehouses, the alternative press.)\u00A0 One of the most frustrating problems was the staggering panoply of physical ailments that arose from proximity to Agent Orange, a Dioxin-laden defoliant that some geniuses decided to ladle onto the landscape of southeast Asia to deprive the enemy of cover. People who got this poison sprayed on them got sick. People who handled it got sick. The government dealt with this crisis the way it dealt with all these crises at the time. It pretended it didn&amp;#039;t exist. (Around this time, President Ronald Reagan closed all the VA&amp;#039;s psychiatric outreach clinics. Noble cause!)\u00A0One of my best friends in sportswriting served there in the Air Force, and his job was to load the Agent Orange onto airplanes. He died of liver cancer in 1991. Consequently, any reference to Agent Orange sets the blog&amp;#039;s Spidey-sense tingling. This week there were two of them.\u00A0The first is a story about how our military efforts in Vietnam are still devastating the Vietnamese. The other is a story about how our government is still stumbling around in the dark. Dioxin, the primary poison in Agent Orange, lingers in the food chain and in the water supply practically forever. Its effects continue long after initial exposure to it, as the people of Vietnam continue to learn to their horror. The U.S. government gives modest compensation to American war veterans for health problems such as leukemia, Hodgkin&amp;#039;s disease and Parkinson&amp;#039;s disease that are attributed to Agent Orange, based on detailed military records of soldiers who were present during the spray operations. Scientists used those records in studies that later associated Agent Orange with more than a dozen ailments in service men and women. But the government has refused to acknowledge claims that the defoliant also harmed the Vietnamese, in part because it says Vietnam has not provided strong data on who was exposed. Medical records in the country are spotty, and the population was also highly mobile in the chaotic postwar years, making exposures to Agent Orange difficult to prove. Vietnam claims its data are sound, but the disagreement has sustained tension for years, particularly about effects that might be passed down to subsequent generations. Although U.S. laboratory tests in animals show that genetic damage caused by dioxin can be passed on to offspring, susceptibility varies widely by species, and no studies have been done in humans. Whether animal findings reflect the human experience &amp;quot;would be notoriously difficult to prove,&amp;quot; cautions Robert Moore, a toxicology researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Elsewhere, the process for American veterans exposed to the poison continues to be torturous, and now the Vietnam veterans\u00A0are beginning to die off, one way or the other. Difficult months of study lie ahead for a working group of senior scientists and health experts that VA Secretary Bob McDonald convened last week, after release of a 10th and final biennial review of evidence of health problems linked to Agent Orange and other herbicide exposures. The institute concludes that the research supports changing the strength of association to herbicide exposure for several ailments. For bladder cancer and hypothyroidism, it found &amp;quot;limited or suggestive&amp;quot; evidence of an association, an upgrade from previous &amp;quot;inadequate or insufficient&amp;quot; evidence. This latest review looked again at scientific literature on cardiovascular conditions and herbicides. The institute didn&amp;#039;t upgrade but it did affirm limited and suggestive evidence that hypertension may be linked to herbicides. This review also considered whether conditions resulting in Parkinson&amp;#039;s-like symptoms, apart from Parkinson&amp;#039;s disease itself, should fall into the same limited or suggestive category of evidence. Yes it should, the institute concluded, finding &amp;quot;no rational basis&amp;quot; for the current exclusion. Let us now conclude once again what a great idea the Vietnam War was for everyone concerned. It&amp;#039;s still killing and maiming people today, its heartbreak now more gratuitous with age. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a43261/agent-orange-vietnam-war-veterans/>