(HOUSTON) - (note: last year, Portland VAMC cancer
researcher Dr. Mark Garzotto published in Cancer his dramatic findings
which also used the word, "double." In that case, published in the
journal Cancer, Agent Orange exposure doubled risks for highly
aggressive prostate cancer. This is a remarkable piece of research.)
Even four decades later, veterans exposed to Agent
Orange during the Vietnam War have twice the risk of developing
unusually invasive nonmelanotic skin cancers compared with the general
population, according to a recent study.
“We noticed a lot of veterans coming into our clinic
had very aggressive squamous and basal cell carcinomas, and it seemed
like there was a connection to Agent Orange exposure, but a literature
search failed to find any studies that showed an association in humans,”
said Mark Clemens, MD, assistant professor of plastic surgery,
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Previous studies have
demonstrated a positive correlation between 2-, 3-, 7-,
8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD), the highly toxic contaminant in Agent
Orange and nonmelanotic invasive skin in animals.
As of 2009, more than 485,000 veterans with Agent
Orange exposure had registered with the VA. DoD and the VA recognize and
provide benefits for many TCDD exposure-associated diseases, including
peripheral neuropathy, amyloidosis, B-cell leukemia, birth defects,
chronic lymphocytic leukemia, type 2 diabetes mellitus, Hodgkin and
non-Hodgkin lymphoma, ischemic heart disease, multiple myeloma,
Parkinson’s disease, porphyria cutanea tarda, prostate cancer,
respiratory cancers, soft-tissue sarcomas and chloracne.
Currently, however, skin cancer is not presumptively
associated with Agent Orange exposure. The latest Institute of Medicine
update to the Veterans and Agent Orange report concluded that there is
“inadequate and insufficient information to determine whether there is
an association between exposure to Agent Orange and basal cell or
squamous cell cancer.”1
READ MORE: http://www.salem-news.com/articles/april042014/agent-orange-ame.php
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