from Betty Mekdeci - our data on birth defects in Gulf War and Vietnam veteran's children

Our most recent report on birth defects and disabilities in the childrenof Vietnam veterans shows the differences in structural and functional birth defects in 1457 children of Vietnam veterans compared to 3131 children of non-veterans in the registry.
This link is to a presentation on Gulf War birth defects I made to the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Veteran’s Administration.
You will find other information about our work on these issues on our Veterans Research page http://www.birthdefects.org/veterans-research/
I am concerned that the new law does not seem to be supporting new research. It appears that the NAS is just looking at the same studies that have been deemed insufficient in years past.
Please let me know if I can answer any questions about our work.

With best regards,
Betty Mekdeci
Executive Director
Birth Defect Research for Children

Court Determines Military Burn Pits Caused Lung Disease in Troops

The thousands of U.S. military personnel and private contractors whose health was compromised by the dense black smoke of burn pits -- and who were then denied proper treatment -- may finally be vindicated by a recent court ruling.
The decision marks a victory for the nearly 64,000 active service members and retirees who have put their names on a Burn Pit Registry created by the Veterans Administration, bringing them one step closer to getting adequate medical coverage, something that has never been guaranteed. Private contractors who were also exposed to the burn pit toxins also have been denied coverage.
"This case has legitimized the disease,"  former contractor Veronica Landry of Colorado Springs, whose case was a part of the recent ruling, told Fox News. "There are many people out there who are still not getting the treatment they need.
"This ruling changes that."
Soldiers have fallen gravely ill or even died from exposure to burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they are not the only ones who have gotten sick. Civilian workers and private contractors like Landry are also suffering an array of maladies including cancer, respiratory problems and blood disorders and, like military victims, they say they are being ignored.
But private employees don't even have the Veterans Administration to lean on. Landry filed her case with the Labor Department for this very reason.

Agent Orange — a humanitarian concern we can do something about

I first went to Vietnam in 1997, three decades after I graduated from college, volunteered for the Peace Corps and was assigned to teach high school in a remote village in Nepal.
One day the students asked me why we Americans were destroying the forests in Vietnam. I couldn’t answer them. But when I arrived in Vietnam as the head of the Ford Foundation office there, I found their assertion to be distressingly true.
Moreover, the herbicides, collectively called Agent Orange, had been contaminated with dioxin, a chemical that is extremely toxic to humans in small amounts. Severe disabilities associated with Agent Orange/dioxin were occurring in generation after generation in Vietnamese families.

Tone-Deaf DAV Recognizes Thomas Murphy For ‘Outstanding’ Veterans Advocacy

In an act of total tone-deafness, DAV will award executive in charge Thomas Murphy for his supposed role as a federal executive displaying outstanding veterans advocacy in "fighting" for the rights of veterans while simultaneously revoking their rights to speed up the disability appeals backlog he is in part responsible for creating.
Thomas Murphy, a known Agent Orange denier, won the award “for his exemplary leadership and service to ill and injured veterans while serving as executive in charge…” of Veterans Benefits Administration.

Life on top of Ithaca's uncapped garbage dump

Several years ago on Mother’s Day, Esther Herkowitz, tried to plant rose bushes in memory of her mother and grandmother.  Instead of soil, she hit cement, metal bits and rebar.
“That was when I found out that I bought a mobile home on an unkempt toxic dump,” she said.
Herkowitz lives at Nate’s Floral Estates at 205 Cecil Malone Drive in Ithaca. Today, the mobile home park residents must plant their fruits and vegetables in raised beds, planters or pots.  This requirement is stipulated in the operating permit issued by the Tompkins County Health Department.
Until 1970, the land under the trailer park was the city of Ithaca’s landfill, accepting wastes, for 30-32 years.  
“This site is the only uncapped toxic landfill in New York State with hundreds of people living directly on top of the dump. It is a scandal that this dump has never been cleaned up,” said environmental activist Walter Hang. He is president of Toxics Targeting, a private firm using government data to track environmental concerns.

Vietnam, US begin Agent Orange cleanup at former wartime air base

Bien Hoa Airport is the largest remaining dioxin hotspot in Vietnam. 
Vietnam and the U.S. have kickstarted the process of cleaning up the dioxin around Bien Hoa Airport, a heavily contaminated zone just outside Ho Chi Minh City.
The process formally began on Tuesday with the signing of a Memorandum of Intent between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Military Science Department under Vietnam's Ministry of Defense.
USAID will be working with the Vietnamese ministry to first design a remediation program before implementing it over the next few years.
“The only way to begin a long journey is to take the first step. The Memorandum of Intent is that first step, and the journey begins today," said U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel J. Kritenbrink, who witnessed the signing together with Senior Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh, Vietnam's Deputy Minister of Defense.
"The United States looks forward to working with the Ministry of National Defense on this important initiative, deepening our partnership further, and building a prosperous future for both our countries.”
The campaign to decontaminate Bien Hoa is part of the two countries' cooperation that started in 2000 to resolve humanitarian and wartime legacies while continuing to strengthen their economic, cultural and security ties.
It will also be the second time the U.S. has been directly involved in a dioxin cleanup effort in Vietnam, following USAID and the defense ministry's $110 million campaign that took five years to clean dioxin-contaminated soil at Da Nang International Airport, which started in 2012.

Women at war: The crucible of Vietnam

Highlights 
Physical health of women deployed to Vietnam was influenced by warzone experiences. 
Career military women Vietnam veterans are happier than women in general population. 
Military and non-military Vietnam service women less likely to marry or have kids.
Paper provides insight to mostly unstudied lives of American women of Vietnam War. 
ABSTRACT - Relatively little has been written about the military women who served in Vietnam, and there is virtually no literature on deployed civilian women (non-military). We examined the experiences of 1285 American women, military and civilian, who served in Vietnam during the war and responded to a mail survey conducted approximately 25 years later in which they were asked to report and reflect upon their experiences and social and health histories.
We compare civilian women, primarily American Red Cross workers, to military women stratified by length of service, describe their demographic characteristics and warzone experiences (including working conditions, exposure to casualties and sexual harassment), and their homecoming following Vietnam. We assess current health and well-being and also compare the sample to age- and temporally-comparable women in the General Social Survey (GSS), with which our survey shared some measures.

Fetal exposure markers of dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs

ABSTRACT - Fetal exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polychlorinated-p-dibenzodioxins (PCDDs), and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) have been associated with a number of adverse health outcomes. Although the placenta acts as a barrier between the mother and the fetus, these contaminants transfer through the placenta exposing the fetus. Several studies have investigated placental transfer...KEEP READING

Thursday, February 15, 2018

AGENT ORANGE TOWN HALL MEETING SCHEDULE CHANGE

We update our meetings regularly on the Town Hall Meeting Calendar:

Change International Falls, Minnesota to May 12th

May 12, 2018
International Falls, Minnesota
Contact Carissa MacLean 218-283-1179
Maynard Kaderlik 507-581-6402

Food activists from Nevada County take on Biotech Goliath, Monsanto in court

Since her early days of activism in the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War when she was an undergrad student in Texas, Grass Valley resident Pamela Osgood has been arrested 150 times as a practicing "steward of the world."
Last May, her loyalty to the health of the human race landed her in the Woodland Jail after she and a small band of folks from Nevada County and other parts of the state formed a blockade in front of Monsanto's largest seed research center in the U.S.
Monsanto is a Fortune 500, modern agricultural company that employs over 20,000 people globally in 69 countries, according to Monsanto's website. Monsanto, acquired by Bayer Crop Science Ag in 2016, is known for its biotech seeds like Roundup Ready Corn.
"The work that is going on in there is really dreadful. We have to get people educated about what Monsanto is doing. Monsanto is poisoning everyone," Osgood said.
Osgood and her sister (a grandmother) were among 10 environmental and human rights activists known as the "Monsanto 10" arrested in the early morning last spring when they tried to block Monsanto staffers arriving to work at the 90,000-square-foot research facility in Yolo County. The protest was one of more than 400 "Anti-Monsanto/Anti-GMO" demonstrations held worldwide in 47 states and 52 countries on six continents.

Why Is Roundup Still Used In Hawaii?

We should make public the names of government officials who approve the use of such poisonous chemicals.
Despite the demands made by residents of Hawaii to end the use of Roundup in the islands, the state continues to spray in parks and public areas with this cousin of Agent Orange.
When the Honolulu Parks Department was queried as to why it continues using a known carcinogen that’s been banned in many cities in the United States and several countries around the world and is involved in more than a dozen lawsuits, including a class-action suit, the reply was that its use was state-approved.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s 3,000-acre Superfund cleanup site in Kunia on Oahu exists because a “state-approved pesticide” was used for pineapple.

After reading a recent opinion piece titled Why Is Roundup Still Used In Hawaii? I wanted to correct some of the misinformation contained in the article.
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in many Roundup-branded weed control products, as well as many other weed control products marketed under different names by different companies. It is used by homeowners, gardeners, farmers, businesses and government agencies to control a lot of different weeds.
Weed control is important. Weeds can cause farmers to lose yields, harbor insect pests, be invasive, create hazard along roadways and be a pest in landscaping.
To be clear, glyphosate is not a “cousin” to Agent Orange, as the article stated. They are not chemically similar. Glyphosate has nothing to do with an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site in Kunia, as the piece seems to suggest.

Friday, February 9, 2018

AGENT ORANGE TOWN HALL MEETING SCHEDULE


We update our meetings regularly on the Town Hall Meeting Calendar:







February 10, 2018
Mesa, Arizona
Contact Chuck Byers 480-258-7105

February 24, 2018
Mitchell, South Dakota
Contact: Terry Mayer
605-830-2011
Maynard Kaderlik
507-581-6402

March 20, 2018
Cape Coral, Florida
Contact: Stuart Berman
239-220-2369

March 24, 2018
Portland, Oregon
Contact: Don Curtis 503-913-1787 
Tom Owen  541-619-8187

April 7, 2018
Marshalltown, Iowa
Contact John Kost
515-212-0741

April 8, 2018
Stratford, New Jersey
Contact: Mike Eckstein
201-874-1664

April 21, 2018
Sanborn, New York
Contact:   Gordon L. Bellinger
716-625-4470

April 21, 2018
International Falls, Minnesota
Contact Carissa MacLean 218-283-1179
Maynard Kaderlik 507-581-6402

April 29, 2018
Mayetta, Kansas
Contact:Roland Mayhew 785-249-4517
Thomas Wabnum 785-554-5248                                                                       
Vlas Ortiz 785-554-3949

Guam EPA: Agent Orange testing yet to start

More than a year after Gov. Eddie Calvo instructed the Guam Environmental Protection Agency to test for traces of Agent Orange, a hazardous defoliant, actual sampling and testing have yet to take place but a work plan is now being developed.
Guam EPA public information officer Nic Rupley on Friday said a contractor hired by the military is now finalizing a work plan, which serves as a guide for sampling, how the testing will be carried out and how the outcome will be interpreted, among other things.
Rupley said Guam EPA has been working with the Department of Defense on the Agent Orange investigation. He said the military awarded a contract to develop the work plan, but a contract for the field work, which includes actual sampling and testing, has yet to be awarded.
Vice Speaker Therese Terlaje wrote a Feb. 1 letter to Guam EPA Administrator Walter Leon Guerrero, seeking an update on the Agent Orange investigation that the governor asked the agency to conduct in January 2017.
"I am hoping that we can shed light on this investigation in order to find answers for our residents and veterans," Terlaje wrote. Local residents, she said, have stated that family members who worked on military properties have since died from cancer.

April 15 dicamba spraying ban in place for Arkansas

On Friday morning, the Arkansas Legislative Council (ALC) passed a proposal to ban the spraying of dicamba in the state after April 15.
The passage was a quiet affair compared to a subcommittee hearing at the capitol three days earlier, which came on the heels of a wintry storm. At that hearing, lawmakers heard some three hours of impassioned testimony from those wanting the April cutoff date and those wanting it pushed into May or June. On a split vote, the subcommittee sent the dicamba proposal package to the full ALC.
The cutoff proposal first came to the legislature last fall following nearly 1,000 off-target dicamba drift complaints and numerous meetings of both the Arkansas State Plant Board and a dicamba task force set up by the governor.

Friday, February 2, 2018

AGENT ORANGE TOWN HALL MEETING SCHEDULE


We update our meetings regularly on the Town Hall Meeting Calendar:





February 10, 2018
Mesa, Arizona
Contact Chuck Byers 480-258-7105

February 24, 2018
Mitchell, South Dakota
Contact: Terry Mayer
605-830-2011
Maynard Kaderlik
507-581-6402

March 20, 2018
Cape Coral, Florida
Contact: Stuart Berman
239-220-2369

March 24, 2018
Portland, Oregon
Contact: Don Curtis 503-913-1787 
Tom Owen  541-619-8187

April 7, 2018
Marshalltown, Iowa
Contact John Kost
515-212-0741

April 21, 2018
Sanborn, New York
Contact:   Gordon L. Bellinger
716-625-4470

April 21, 2018
International Falls, Minnesota
Contact Carissa MacLean 218-283-1179
Maynard Kaderlik 507-581-6402

April 29, 2018
Mayetta, Kansas
Contact:Roland Mayhew 785-249-4517
Thomas Wabnum 785-554-5248                                                                       
Vlas Ortiz 785-554-3949