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http://www.change.org/petitions/health-care-now-for-military-families-poisoned-at-camp-lejeune
My name is Jerry Ensminger, and I served my country faithfully for 24 years in the United States Marine Corps. During that time, I trained thousands of recruits to become honored Marines. And, like too many who lived at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, my family suffered great tragedy due to contaminated water at the base.
That’s why I’m asking for your help, to call on the U.S. government to help the families still suffering from the effects of toxic water at Camp Lejeune. Those of us who drank the water have suffered from cancers, leukemias, miscarriages and birth defects from the cancer-causing chemicals in the water. Last month, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said providing healthcare to Camp Lejeuene veterans is "premature," and there are two bills in Congress that would provide health care ffor the families and veterans who desperately need it. But these measures are being held up by politics.
Our nation's leaders must act now to provide health care for the veterans and their families who were stationed at Camp Lejeune.
In 1983, my daughter Janey was diagnosed with childhood leukemia. Janey -- the only one of my children either conceived, born, or raised on the base -- was just six years old. For two and a half years, I watched Janey fight for her life. I watched her fight, suffer, and die. She passed away 27 years ago, when she was just 9 years old.
READ MORE: http://www.change.org/petitions/health-care-now-for-military-families-poisoned-at-camp-lejeune
The Human Arts Association P.O. Box 3238, NY, NY 10008
Vietnam: The Secret Agent delivers the authoritative account of the history and
troubling legacy of Agent Orange. — David Zierler, Ph.D., Office of the Historian,
U.S. Department of State. In honor of Memorial Day, we invite VVA members, family and friends to watch the newly digitized version of the film Vietnam: The Secret Agent over the internet, in collaboration with New Day Digital — free until Junehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif 15th.
Vietnam: The Secret Agent is an award-winning film which documents the Vietnam
Veterans' heroic struggle in the early 80's to attain just treatment and compensation
for illnesses caused by exposure to Agent Orange.
"... excellent ... a tough, angry look at the consequences of exposure to Agent
Orange... a chilling issue that is effectively addressed here." — The New York
Times The recently released DVD of this classic documentary is loaded with bonus features -- updated interviews of veterans, families of veterans, eyewitness photographers, and artists' responses to the legacy of Agent Orange. For more information, visit: http://vietnamthesecretagent.com/
We hope you will take us up on our offer to watch this film for free in honor of
Memorial Day and your service to our country.
http:/northernnewyorkleftnews.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/us-epa-failing-to-warn-public-of-dioxin-exposure-disease-risk/
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently published a document titled, “Reanalysis of Key Issues Related to Dioxin Toxicity and Response to NAS Comments”. This document is being described as part of the agency’s dioxin reassessment. EPA struggled for over twenty years to create a final document addressing dioxin exposure disease risk. Now that such a document has been published, EPA is misinterpreting the document so as to please corporate interests.
In the above named document EPA sets forth a non-carcinogenic effects oral reference dose for dioxin. The oral reference dose is 0.7 picograms dioxin TEQ/kg bw/day. Per capita dioxin exposure at current levels of food supply contamination is estimated to be approximately 0.6 picograms dioxin TEQ /kg bw/day. EPA takes the position that the food supply is safe. This position can not be defended with logic. Those who consume animal fats receive dioxin exposure in excess of the oral reference dose. Exposure in excess of the oral reference dose means that significant disease risk is imposed. The food supply is not safe. EPA is responsible for protecting the environment and the public health. EPA is responsible for warning the American public concerning the presence of unsafe levels of dioxin in the animal fat portion of the food supply. Failure to provide this warning results in avoidable harm to public health. EPA’s behavior is unethical and should be corrected.
I have sought to discuss the unreasonableness of this position with the Acting Director of the Office of Research and Development, Lek Kadeli. Mr. Kadeli has not responded.
http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20120518-vietnam-airport-world-most-dioxin-contaminated-place.aspx
The Bien Hoa military airport in the southern province of Dong Nai has the world’s highest Agent Orange/dioxin contamination level, a meeting heard Thursday.
The office of the national steering committee tasked with handling the consequences of toxic chemical used by the US during the Vietnam War (Office 33) reported at the meeting that the airport has more than ten hectares of heavily polluted soil.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Dioxin has entered local water species and food chains, it said.
Le Ke Son, chief of the office, said it was necessary to issue urgent warnings, especially about food sources near the airport, as it is very likely that the dioxin contamination would have spread to surrounding areas.
According to Office 33, which organized the meeting to seek solutions for the airport’s contamination, at least 94,000 square meters of tainted soil have been buried at the airport.
READ MORE: http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20120518-vietnam-airport-world-most-dioxin-contaminated-place.aspx
http://www.newswise.com/articles/loyola-lactation-consultant-reacts-to-report-on-toxins-in-breast-milk
Source: Loyola University Health System
Newswise — When writer Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she had her breast milk analyzed for toxins. What she found surprised her. Trace amounts of pesticides, dioxin, a jet-fuel ingredient and high-to-average levels of flame retardants were present in her breast milk. She reported on these findings in New York Times Magazine, which has since set off a wave of controversy. A Loyola University Health System lactation consultant puts these findings in perspective.
“All human bodies contain toxins. This includes infants, regardless of what they are fed,” said Pam Allyn, RN, BSN, LCCE, IBCLC, lactation consultant. “The question is, which has greater risk and fewer advantages – breast milk or formula? Breast milk is still best for babies for its numerous protective benefits.”
Allyn reports that risks of formula feeding infants include an increased incidence of SIDS, hospitalization for lower-respiratory tract infections, childhood obesity, Type 2 diabetes, leukemia and asthma. Not breastfeeding also increases the risk of breast and ovarian cancer for mothers.
The World Health Organization states that the advantages of breastfeeding far outweigh the potential risks from environmental pollutants. The American Academy of Pediatricians, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Public Health Association also continue to recommend breastfeeding infants for at least 12 months.
“While the author expresses concern for what she found in her breast milk, she also concedes that while breast milk is food, it also is medicine,” Allyn said. “Breast milk is known to contain nutrients that cannot be duplicated by any laboratory formula, and these nutrients make children more resistant to disease and infection. That is a key point that mothers should keep in mind when they are determining if they are going to breastfeed their baby.”
http://www.gazette.net/article/20120516/NEWS/705169530/1007/rockville-veteran-shares-experience-after-returning-from-visit-to&template=gazette
“Instead of raising weapons, we were raising glasses and saying ‘To our health’”
Michael Marceau of Rockville, a veteran critically wounded during the Vietnam War, spent two weeks in April in Vietnam as part of a peace and reconciliation tour. The tour focused on educating veterans about Agent Orange and unexploded ordnances.
Question: Why did you head to Vietnam for a peace and reconciliation tour?
Answer: The purpose of the trip ostensibly was to find out about Agent Orange and unexploded ordnance: What’s the situation there on the ground? What are some of the processes of trying to deal with the clean up of both of those problems? So we had meetings pretty regularly with some of the people and groups that are involvehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd with that on a day to day basis on the ground in different areas of Vietnam. Some of the situations we ran across are pretty heartbreaking. Especially some of the Agent Orange victims. We sprayed millions of gallons in the 1960s and early 1970s … and there are still areas of the country where nothing has grown since then. We are beginning to see the third generation of victims over there.
Q: What was the most challenging aspect of the trip?
A: Seeing the Agent Orange victims.
READ MORE: http://www.gazette.net/article/20120516/NEWS/705169530/1007/rockville-veteran-shares-experience-after-returning-from-visit-to&template=gazette
http://www.vpr.net/npr/152818798/
When writer Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she read a research study about toxins found in human breast milk. She decided to test her own breast milk and shipped a sample to a lab in Germany.
What came back surprised her.
Trace amounts of pesticides, dioxin and a jet fuel ingredient — as well as high to average levels of flame retardants — were all found in her breast milk. How could something like this happen?
"It turns out that our breasts are almost like sponges, the way they can soak up some of these chemicals, especially the ones that are fat-loving — the ones [that] tend to accumulate in fat tissue," Williams tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Unfortunately, the breast is also masterful at converting these molecules into food in the way of breast milk.
Learning that breasts soak up lots of chemicals made Williams wonder just what else was going on with breasts. A lot, as it turns out. In her new book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, Williams offers her take on — among other things — why breasts are getting bigger and developing earlier, why tumors seem to gravitate toward the breast, and how toxins from the environment may be affecting hormones and breast development.
She says many of those toxins, including the flame retardants found in her breast milk, may come from ordinary household items like couches and electronics, which often contain flame retardants. Some animal studies have shown that certain types of flame retardants interact with hormone levels.
READ MORE & LISTEN: http://www.vpr.net/npr/152818798/
http://www.walb.com/story/18375767/special-report-still-fighting
MOULTRIE, GA -
In 1962, the United States started spraying Vietnam with a powerful defoliant known as 'Agent Orange.'
Fighting in the Vietnam War ended in 1975, but even today, many veterans of that war are still battling health problems they believe were caused by the chemicals.
'Operation Ranch Hand' dropped 20 million gallons of chemical herbicide and defoliant on Vietnam. These members of Moultrie's VFW served in Vietnam in the mid-60's, and now nearly 40 years later, in their mid-sixties, say those chemicals still affect their lives.
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"It's still with you. It's something that stays with you the rest of your life," Ed Irby, an Army Vietnam Veteran 1966-1967, said.
And they admit too often when they are together, one topic of conversation is their common health problems.
"I got bad kidneys. Bad heart," Ronald Carruthers said. Carruthers, an Army Vietnam Veteran in 1969-1970, said they told him Agent Orange had something to do with it.
"I have health problem," Wayland Gay, and Army Vietnam Veteran in 1967-1968 said. "I have diabetes, been diagnosed and treated for prostrate cancer."
READ MORE & WATCH VIDEO: http://www.walb.com/story/18375767/special-report-still-fighting
Paper trail: Michelle Gatz holds the logbook of the SS Schuyler Otis Bland, which apparently transported defoliants to Okinawa in the early 1960s. MICHELLE GATZ
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120517f2.html
By JON MITCHELL
Special to The Japan Times
Recently uncovered documents show that the United States conducted top-secret tests of Agent Orange in Okinawa in 1962, according to a veterans services employee.
The experiments, believed to have taken place under the auspices of Project AGILE — a classified program to research unconventional warfare techniques — have also been confirmed by a former high-ranking American official.
The documents, which include a ship's logbook, army deployment orders and declassified government records, were tracked down by Michelle Gatz, a veterans service officer in Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota.
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While assisting a former soldier who claims he was poisoned by these defoliants at military ports in Okinawa in the early 1960s, Gatz pieced together the paper trail of how the chemicals were transported from the U.S. to the island aboard the merchant marine ship SS Schuyler Otis Bland.
"The ship's logbook shows it was carrying classified cargo that was offloaded under armed guard at White Beach (a U.S. Navy port on Okinawa's east coast) on 25 April, 1962," Gatz told The Japan Times.
The Bland was a civilian-owned ship regularly employed by the U.S. Navy to transport defoliants incognito and that was able to bypass customs inspections of military vessels entering foreign ports.
READ MORE: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120517f2.html
His children are 36 and 33 years old, but they look just like three-year-old boys who still scream through the night, smash anything they find in the house, and bite their parents’ hands for comfort.
In 1968, Nguyen Van Tao, from the northern province of Thai Nguyen, fought to expel the American army from the A Luoi Valley in what is now the central province of Thua Thien-Hue. The US drenched the area with Agent Orange for ten years, 1961-1971 period.
Tao said he was exposed to Agent Orange and blamed his sons’ mental and physical health problems on dioxin, a highly toxic chemical in the herbicide, which US troops used to strip Vietnamese forces of ground cover and food.
But like up to 4.8 million Vietnamese victims who were exposed to the poison, Tao has no idea when its producers will pay them the damages they demand.
“I even don’t know who they [the producers] are,” Tao told Vietweek.
But he might soon as Dow Chemical Company, one of the two major manufacturers of Agent Orange, is all set to crank up its global profile through a 10-year US$100-million Olympic sponsorship. The US chemical giant will give away $100 million every four years to sponsor the Olympics through 2020.READ MORE:
http://www.thanhniennews.com/2010/pages/20120511-vietnam-protests-dow-olympic-sponsorship-over-agent-orange-crimes.aspx
http://eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2012/05/08/4
Jeremy P. Jacobs, E&E reporter
Greenwire: Tuesday, May 8, 2012
The video shows corn being harvested against an orange sky as a pianist plays a somber tune.
"Think about the challenge that the world is facing, quite honestly," Dan Kittle, the vice president of research and development for Dow AgroSciences LLC, says in the next frame. "Over the next 40 years, we have to produce as much food as the entire planet has produced in the previous 10,000 years of mankind."
Images of farms follow, with farmers saying they need a better system to control threatening weeds.
It's all a buildup for the appearance of Dow's Enlist Weed Control System, which uses genetically modified corn seeds that are resistant to 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), a widely used herbicide. The product, the narrator suggests, is critical to the U.S. food supply and the "Future of Farming," the title of Dow's six-minute YouTube video.
MORE: http://eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2012/05/08/4
Originally published in The Asia Pacific Journal Japan Focus
Thousands of barrels of Agent Orange were unloaded on Okinawa Island and stored at the port of Naha, and at the U.S. military's Kadena and Camp Schwab bases between 1965 and 1966, an American veteran who served in Okinawa claims.
In a Jacksonville Florida interview in early April with The Japan Times and Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV network based in Okinawa, former infantryman Larry Carlson, 67, also said that Okinawan stevedores were exposed to the highly toxic herbicide as they labored in the holds of ships, and that he witnessed it being sprayed at Kadena Air Base.
Carlson is one of only three American servicemen who have won benefits from the U.S. government over exposure to the toxic defoliant on Okinawa — and the first of them to step forward and reveal that massive amounts of it were kept on the island.
His claims, which are corroborated by five fellow soldiers and a 1966 U.S. government document, directly challenge the Pentagon's consistent denials that Agent Orange was ever stored on Okinawa.
READ MORE: http://www.fpif.org/articles/us_veteran_exposes_pentagons_denials_of_agent_orange_use_on_okinawa
http://www.change.org/petitions/health-care-now-for-military-families-poisoned-at-camp-lejeune
