Concerning the Bloomberg News Service article by Aaron Blake
“The virus death toll has surpassed Vietnam. Is the comparison fair?” in the
May 3 Star-Ledger:
It is only fair to compare death rates from Vietnam and
COVID-19 when the silent killer Agent Orange is included. No one knows how many
hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans this chemical has killed.
While the official U.S. death toll from the Vietnam War may
be 58,220, far more of the estimated 3.5 million who served in the war are
likely to have died — or are dying — from complications due to exposure from
toxic dioxin in Agent Orange. The military used Agent Orange as a herbicide in
Vietnam and Thailand from 1962 to 1971.
A 1998-2006 study of more than 13,000 Vietnam veterans, half
exposed to Agent Orange and half not, found that the exposed group got prostate
cancer at twice the rate as the other group. Also, those in the exposed group
were two-and-a-half times as likely to have the more deadly type of metastasis
(spreading) form of cancer.
Despite this, the federal government and the Department of
Veterans Affairs are not tracking or following up with Vietnam veterans about
these health issues. Hundreds of thousands of aging veterans are left to find
out about this silent killer on their own.
John Conway, Jackson
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