Army veteran William Penner
used to jokingly call the thick yellow crust that crept across his
young son Matthew’s scalp “Agent Orange” after the toxic defoliant
sprayed on him in Vietnam before the boy was born. The joke turned sour a
few years ago, when Matthew, now 43, was diagnosed with a host of
serious illnesses, including heart disease, fibromyalgia and arthritis.
Similar worries struck vet Mike Blackledge when staffers at a local
Veterans Affairs hospital suggested his children’s diseases could be
linked to his time in Vietnam. His son has inflammatory bowel disease so
advanced he wears a pouch to collect his waste, and his youngest
daughter has neuropathy, spinal problems and gastrointestinal issues.
His oldest daughter — the one born before he went to fight in Vietnam —
is fine.
They, like thousands of others, are grappling with a chilling
prospect: Could Agent Orange, the herbicide linked to health problems in
Vietnam veterans, have also harmed their children?
For decades, the Department of Veterans Affairs has collected — and
ignored — reams of information that could have helped answer that
question, an investigation by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot has
found.
Its medical staff has physically examined more than 668,000 Vietnam veterans possibly exposed to Agent Orange,
documenting health conditions and noting when and where they served. For at least 34 years, the agency also
has asked questions about their children’s birth defects, before and after the war.
But the birth defect data had never received scrutiny by the VA or
anyone else until this year, when ProPublica, working with The
Virginian-Pilot, obtained it after submitting a detailed plan describing
how it would be used and agreeing to protect patients’ identities.
The analysis that followed was revealing: The odds of having a child
born with birth defects during or after the war were more than a third
higher for veterans who say they handled, sprayed or were directly
sprayed with Agent Orange than for veterans who say they weren’t exposed
or weren’t sure. The analysis controlled for such variables as age and
health status.
The data has some caveats. The VA, for example, had no way of
verifying the vets’ Agent Orange exposure and did not independently
confirm information about their children’s birth defects. Even so,
experts said the results should prompt the VA to take the issue
seriously.
“It’s like a sign that says ‘Dig Here’ and they’re not digging,” said
Dr. David Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at Boston
University and co-editor-in-chief of the online journal Environmental
Health, after reviewing ProPublica’s findings. “It raises questions
about whether they want to know the answer or are just hoping the
problem will naturally go away as the veterans die off.”
No comments:
Post a Comment