Panel may rethink Agent Orange law

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By DAVID ROGERS | 9/24/10 12:33 AM EDT

With costs mounting, the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is laying the groundwork for a second look at the landmark 1991 Agent Orange law that has governed nearly two-decades of disability claims related to the herbicide widely used in the Vietnam War.

That was the consistent theme of a hearing Thursday that featured testimony by Cabinet secretaries past and present about living under the law’s limits and navigating through the often vague scientific standards for judging what diseases qualify as service-connected claims.

Veterans Affairs Secy. Eric Shinseki strongly defended his controversial decision last year to add ischemic heart disease but allowed too that having just 60 days to reach a conclusion –as prescribed by the Agent Orange law— was “a bit constraining….a little challenging.”

Former VA Secretary Anthony Principi, whose decision to add type 2 diabetes in 2001 has since led to an explosion is claims, was more blunt, saying he had desperately wanted clearer scientific evidence to help him sort through confounding life style factors, like diet or smoking, which might contribute to an illness.

“It’s a greater challenge for secretaries, when you're dealing with the diabetes, the prostate cancer, because we know if we live long enough, we're going to die of prostate cancer, as well as heart disease,” Principi said. “And those confounding factors really make it very, very difficult for us”

Indeed, Agent Orange claims are a world turned-upside-down from decades ago when returning soldiers had to fight to get attention to deadly lymphomas linked to the herbicide. Now the more common frailties of men in their sixties—prostate cancer, diabetes, heart disease—lead the list, and VA estimates that one out of every four surviving Vietnam veterans could soon be collecting payments for one Agent Orange claim or another.

The hearing brought some touching moments. Shinseki, who served himself in Vietnam, repeatedly referred to the infantry soldiers then as “the youngsters.”


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