Shaped by war

Concord (NH) Monitor
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100218/ENTERTAINMENT/2180304&template=single

PHOTO: MELANIE PLENDA / Monitor staff

Their bodies are radically different than what we're used to seeing: Claws take the place of fingers, bones appear where they shouldn't, voids exist where there should be bone and flesh. But Keisha Luce of Franconia sees something extraordinary in them.

"I think there is something beautiful about each of the pieces," said the 32-year-old Dartmouth College graduate student, who traveled to Vietnam last year to make casts of Agent Orange victims. "And I think that's important because they are beautiful people. . . . They're not bodies of the grotesque or freak show bodies; they are different bodies.

"We went to Vietnam to change the landscape, and we changed the human body. . . . I think it's important to bear witness and recognize these bodies exist."

Luce spent three months in Vietnam, listening to the stories and casting the bodies of a handful of the estimated three million to four million Vietnamese people suffering from the mental, physical and genetic effects of Agent Orange exposure. Her project, called Sum and Parts, was on display for a time at the college.

For several years during the Vietnam War, America doused large areas of the country with a dioxin-based herbicide dubbed Agent Orange. The purpose was to kill heavy vegetation that gave Vietnamese soldiers cover and opportunity to ambush American troops. Though the war ended, Agent Orange lingered, in the ground, in the water and in the Vietnamese people. The result has been large incidences of cancer and at least three generations of children born with a variety of birth defects passed down from earlier generations.

Man who tested Agent Orange now lives with consequences

Stars and Stripes

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?article=68061&section=104





Bob Decker, 69, served in the Army in 1963 and is one of a few dozen men... (SUSAN TRIPP POLLARD, Contra Costa (CA) Times)


By John Simerman, Contra Costa Times
Stars and Stripes online edition, Tuesday, February 16, 2010

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — Bob Decker fought prostate cancer a decade ago, then three years ago got another jolt, diagnosed with Parkinson's.
He never thought about a link — much less one 45 years in the past, halfway around the world — until he met a Vietnam veteran in 2008 while fishing for tuna off the San Diego coast.
"He had prostate cancer and he said, 'Oh yeah, the VA gave me so much per month,' " said Decker, sitting slightly hunched in his Concord, Calif., home.
"The wheels started turning."
Decker, 69, never fought in Vietnam, yet he worked intimately with Agent Orange, the herbicide and defoliant that the United States military sprayed across the jungle to deny Vietnamese forces crops and cover. Containing a powerful dioxin, it has since been linked to more than a dozen cancers and other illnesses, including prostate cancer and, more recently, Parkinson's.

Soldiers trained at Gagetown may have been exposed to Agent Orange

http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/reports-rapports/defoliant/index-eng.asp
The Use of Herbicides at CFB Gagetown from 1952 to Present Day
For three days in June 1966 and four days in June 1967, Agent Orange, Agent Purple and other unregistered herbicides were tested at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Gagetown in cooperation with the U.S. military to evaluate their effectiveness. These are the only known instances that these military test chemicals were used at CFB Gagetown. Agent Orange, Agent Purple and other unregistered herbicides are not used at the base today. The base uses only federally regulated herbicides for brush control during its annual vegetation management program.

http://www.maine.gov/dvem/bvs/CFB%20Gagetown%20Agent%20Orange%20Information%20Paper.pdf

CFB Gagetown & Agents Orange/Purple
Information Paper as of 28JUN05
The Canadian Department of National Defense (DND) announced that for three days in June 1966 (14-16) and four days in June 1967 (21-24), small-scale testing of various defoliants and desiccants, including Agent Orange and Agent Purple, took place over a small portion of the Canadian Forces Base (CFB), Gagetown, New Brunswick.
Based on current information, Canadian officials stated that the U.S. supplied only two barrels of the Agent Orange and Agent Purple defoliants for testing purposes. The testing did not involve wide-spread spraying. Controlled testing occurred under strict conditions, ensuring minimal drift, in an area difficult to access. The testing area was comprised of two small areas covering approximately 83 acres of the 180,000 plus acres of CFB Gagetown.


Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, referred to as CFB Gagetown is a large Canadian Forces Base located in southwestern New Brunswick.

Marine Base's Ex-Residents, Many Ill, Only Now Learning of Toxic Water

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/15-2

by Barbara Barrett

WASHINGTON — Paul Akers was in his oncologist's office last summer when his adult daughter handed him a magazine.
He saw a half-page ad from the Marine Corps, alerting former residents of Camp Lejeune, N.C., that if they lived on the base between 1957 and 1987, they might have been exposed to contaminated water.
Akers thought about his mother, the wife of a Marine, who died in 1960.
He remembered his little sister, whom he called Penny. She died of cancer in June at 61. She'd been diagnosed last spring, when she went in to be tested as a bone marrow match for her ailing brother. She was dead within a month.
Akers thought, too, of his own struggle, undergoing chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins' lymphoma.
"You can see why I'm angry at the military," Akers told McClatchy.
Akers, 64, lived on base for years as a young child, building forts among the pine trees and splashing in a plastic kiddie pool with his little sister, cooling off in the sweltering Carolina summers.
The water, it turned out, was poisonous.

Vietnam generation begins to fade as death rate rises for war's veterans

Forty years ago, Ron Willoughby was death with a telescopic sight as a Marine sniper in Vietnam.
Today, mortality has Willoughby and other Vietnam veterans in its crosshairs.
The generation of an estimated 8 million military service members of the Vietnam era, 1964-1975, is fading.
The number of Vietnam veteran deaths has almost doubled since 2001 and, according Department of Veterans Affairs' projections, will hit 103,890 this year -- approaching 300 a day. That's more than five times the average daily number of U.S. combat deaths during the peak casualty year of the war in 1968.
Willoughby, now 63 and a year older than the national average age of Vietnam vets, said three members of his old unit have died in the past five years, two from cancer and one from a heart attack.
That's why the North Olmsted veteran said the unit reunions have been changed from once every two years to annual affairs.
Time is catching up, and they know it.

PHOTO-Chuck Crow, The Plain Dealer
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/02/vietnam_vets_fight_final_battl.html

Autistic Spectrum Disorders Report - 2009

http://www.birthdefects.org/research/ASD%20Report%202009.pdf


Summary
This report provides data about the high frequency of physical defects among children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders in an analysis of 137 Autistic Spectrum Disorders in a database of 2030 cases of birth defects in the National Birth Defect Registry. The report also includes the most frequent parental exposures and illnesses recorded for pre-conception and pregnancy.
Background:
The National Birth Defect Registry was started in 1990 by Birth Defect Research for Children (BDRC) to collect information on all kinds of birth defects both structural and functional, as well as information on the pre-conceptual and prenatal health, genetic factors and exposure histories of both parents. The Registry was designed and evaluated by an advisory board of seven prominent scientists working in fields ranging from obstetrics and genetics to epidemiology and the effects of toxic exposures on reproduction. The original questionnaire for the project was a
16-page booklet that parents filled out and mailed to BDRC. Data from the questionnaire were then manually entered into an inter-relational data base. Approximately 4,000 case reports were collected in this version of the registry.
In April of 2004, BDRC converted the registry to an on-line project so that parents could fill out the questionnaire at any convenient time of the day or night. The on-line project also made it easier to add new sections to the registry questionnaire without the cost of reprinting thousands of questionnaire booklets and mailing them to parents. The quality of data collection is more accurate as well, since the parent enters information directly into the on-line questionnaire and
then BDRC staff imports the questionnaire into the main registry.
The registry is designed to identify patterns of similar birth defects that may have similar conditions or exposures in common in the parents’ pregnancy or pre-conceptual history. A slide presentation http://www.birthdefects.org/NIEHS/3510.html made to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences explains the operation of the registry and some of the birth defect issues BDRC has worked on using registry data.
Since April of 2004, parents have completed 1853 questionnaires with case reports for 2030 children (more than one child in a family can be reported on a questionnaire) in the on-line National Birth Defect Registry. We have reports for 1095 males, 926 females and 9 cases where the gender was not entered.

The National Birth Defect Registry Birth Defect Research

The National Birth Defect Registry Birth Defect Research for Children was just cited in an article (page 443) on Environmental Factors in Birth Defects in the October issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Birth Defect Research for Children
http://www.birthdefects.org


Focus | Environmental Factors in Birth Defects

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2009/117-10/EHP117pa440PDF.PDF

Environmental Health Perspectives • volume 117 | number 10 | October 2009 A 443

Betty Mekdeci, executive director of the advocacy group Birth Defect Research for Children, says there are many problems with the basics of how birth defects are tracked and evaluated. Her experience of more than 30 years—prompted by her efforts, and those of her husband, to figure out why their son was born with multiple birth defects—led her to conclude that some of the most important limitations include inadequate medical diagnostic codes for classifying many birth defects, inaccurate use of codes by health care practitioners to meet insurance billing requirements, and the inability of many health care practitioners to diagnose a birth defect at birth or in follow-up visits, and skepticism toward the input of parents, who usually know better than any one doctor about the full range of health problems their child is having.
To overcome some of these problems, Mekdeci and her colleagues have developed an alternative method of tracking birth defect incidence based on parent responses to a lengthy questionnaire.

Global Chemical Pollution

http://poisoned.homestead.com/linkornage.html

http://www.youtube.com/v/cW7q4ICXp0s&rel=0

http://www.youtube.com/v/tznQ2Bko5X4&rel=0

WHAT IS AGENT ORANGE
Agent Orange was one of several defoliants (herbicides) containing trace amounts of a toxic contaminant, TCDD (dioxin). Defoliants were used during the Vietnam War to kill vast areas of jungle growth. The real, Agent Orange, was a 1:1 mixture of the n-butyl esters of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). A byproduct contaminant of the manufacturing process for 2,4,5-T (used in all the agents during the Vietnam War) is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD). TCDD is commonly referred to as dioxin.

Agent Orange is the code name for an herbicide and defoliant used by the U.S. military in its Herbicidal Warfare program during the Vietnam War, when an estimated 21,136,000 gal. (80 000 m³) of Agent Orange were sprayed across South Vietnam. 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects.

From 1961 to 1971, Agent Orange was by far the most widely used of the so-called "Rainbow Herbicides" employed in the Herbicidal Warfare program. During the production of Agent Orange (as well as Agents Purple, Pink, and Green) dioxins were produced as a contaminant, which have caused health problems for those exposed during the Vietnam War. Agents Blue and White were part of the same program but did not contain dioxins.

Bite Taken Out of Chemical Secrecy

http://www.ombwatch.org/node/10721

Posted on January 27, 2010


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Jan. 21 a new practice that will prevent chemical manufacturers from hiding the identities of chemicals that have been found to pose a significant risk to environmental or public health. The policy is a small step to increase the transparency of the nation's chemical laws, and it highlights both the problem of excessive secrecy and the power of the executive branch to make government more open – even without action by Congress or the courts.

The new practice, which took effect immediately upon publication, changes how the agency handles information submitted by chemical companies under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the primary statute regulating chemicals. Under TSCA Section 8(e), chemical companies must notify EPA of any information indicating a chemical substance or mixture presents a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment. In numerous cases, EPA has allowed companies to hide the identity of the chemical in these reports as a trade secret. Under the new policy, EPA will reject confidentiality claims for a chemical's identity if the name is already publicly disclosed on TSCA's inventory of chemicals in commerce (a list of more than 83,000 chemical substances). The TSCA inventory does not include chemical substances subject to other statutes, such as food additives, pesticides, drugs, and cosmetics.

Toxic Water Contamination aboard U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune

http://www.tftptf.com/
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is currently studying the effects of toxic exposure upon former residents of Camp Lejeune. Two separate water distribution systems aboard Camp Lejeune were found to be contaminated, the Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point water distribution systems.


If you would like a copy of the Newsletter and are not currently a member of TFTPTF, please email Andrea at Andrea.Byron@tftptf.com

http://vva.org/Committees/AgentOrange/index.html


THE WORTHINGTONS
By Jim Belshaw
The Worthington’s story is brought to you by The Missouri Vietnam Veterans Foundation.

Read the entire story at http://www.vva.org/veteran/1209/faces.html

Herb Worthington’s e-mail, meant to provide background on his own Agent Orange-connected diseases and the diseases now afflicting his children, is not yet two sentences long before the words leap off the page.
“It rips me apart with self-hatred every time I tell it,” he writes. “I get so sad, the tears flow like a stream, and it makes it that much more difficult, because the keyboard is totally blurred.” Asked about it later, he says, “I hate myself. Why? For bringing all this pain and suffering to my children. They don’t deserve it.” He has not spoken to his children about it. “I don’t have the courage,” he said.
His daughter, Karen, 35, suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS). His son, Michael, 33, has suffered from bronchitis and allergies since infancy. Michael’s own children also have been diagnosed with chronic bronchitis, and Herb says the grandchildren also display uncontrolled and inexplicable fits of anger. Herb, himself, is 100 percent disabled, diagnosed with Agent Orange-caused Type II Diabetes. He suffers from “terrible” Peripheral Neuropathy, which the VA recognizes as a service-connected condition.
“It starts out as a tingling, like pins and needles,” he said. “Hands and feet get cold. You think they’re cold, but they could be warm to the touch. As it progresses, they go numb and have stabbing knife-like pains. They say it’s a circulation problem, a secondary condition usually to diabetes. Now the VA in Newark is trying to deny guys because of self-medication because the disease is also symptomatic to alcoholism.”











Gary Jones’s Story
By Jim Belshaw
Gary Jones’s story is brought to you by the California Veterans Benefit Fund.

Read the entire story at http://vva.org/Faces_Of_AO/Jones.pdf

For Gary Jones, the puzzle that is Agent Orange can be explained, or more to the point, not explained, by two words — “circumstantial” and “coincidence.” The words are at once the core and the conundrum of his Agent Orange experience.
“The problem with all this Agent Orange discussion is that everything is circumstantial,” Jones said. “We can’t prove anything. But after awhile, the word ‘coincidence’ just doesn’t work anymore. Something is causing all these different problems.”
He pulled two tours of duty in Vietnam, one blue, the other brown. The first for the young Naval officer came in the deep water off the Vietnam coastline; the second came inland, in the brown water of the Cam Lo River, near the DMZ, where he worked delivering supplies with Marines and an ARVN unit.
“My job was kind of like being on the old Red Ball Express, but on water,” he said.
Before Jones returned to Vietnam with Vietnam Veterans of America in recent years, the dominate memory of the country for him always came with a reddish hue, not the deep, rich green that stretches across Vietnam as far as the eye can see.
“Everything was reddish,” he said. “Red mud, red water. Everything in my mind was red because we’d killed off the vegetation.”
The area in which he operated was heavily saturated with Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant being delivered by air, from the backs of trucks, and by hand. At the time, he said, no one knew much about the defoliant.

Significant numbers of Vietnam veterans have children and grandchildren with birth defects related to exposure to Agent Orange. To alert legislators and the media to this ongoing legacy of the war, we are seeking real stories about real people. If you wish to share your family’s health struggles that you believe are due to Agent Orange/dioxin, send an email to mporter@vva.org or call 301-585-4000, Ext. 146.

VA identifies ship crews affected by Agent Orange

The Saratogian
by Robert Mitchell
http://saratogian.com/articles/2010/02/01/life/doc4b67284618985436599296.txt

Veterans' Corner
Agent Orange exposure Compensation and Pension (C&P) Service has initiated a program to collect data on Vietnam naval operations for the purpose of providing regional offices with information to assist with development in related disability claims based on herbicide exposure from Navy veterans.

To date, we have received verification from various sources showing that a number of offshore “blue water” naval vessels conducted operations on the inland “brown water” rivers and delta areas of Vietnam. We have also identified certain vessel types that operated primarily or exclusively on the inland waterways. The ships and dates of inland waterway service are listed below. If a veteran’s service aboard one of these ships can be confirmed through military records during the time frames specified, then exposure to herbicide agents can be presumed without further development.




USS Carronade (IFS 1);USS Clarion River (LSMR 409); USS Francis River (LSMR 525);USS White River (LSMR 536); USS Ingersoll (DD-652); USS Mansfield (DD-728); USS Richard E. Kraus (DD-849); USS Basilone (DD-824); USS Hamner (DD-718); USS Conway (DD-507); USS Fiske (DD-842); USS Black (DD-666); USS Providence (CLG-6); USS Mahan (DLG-11); USS Okanogan (APA-220); USS Niagara Falls (AFS-3).

More veterans in government

President Barack Obama recently signed an executive order aimed at hiring more veterans to work in the federal government.

Under the executive order, 23 cabinet-level and lower departments and agencies will band together to form the Council on Veterans Employment.

The purpose of the council will be to advise and assist the president and the director of the Office of Personnel management in establishing a coordinated government-wide effort to increase the number of veterans employed by the federal government.

They will advise on how to enhance recruitment and training; serve as a national forum for promoting veterans employment opportunities and establish performance measures to assess the effectiveness of the council.

Veterans benefits

Dental: Veterans may receive one-time dental treatment if they were not provided treatment within 90 days before separation from active duty. The time limit does not apply to veterans with dental conditions resulting from service-connected wounds or injuries. Expiration is 180 days from separation.

Medical: VA provides a wide range of health care services to veterans, including treatment for military sexual trauma and for conditions possibly related to exposure to Agent Orange, ionizing radiation and other environmental hazards in the Persian Gulf. Generally, veterans must be enrolled in VA’s health care system to receive care. There is no time limit on this benefit.

Former POWs with osteoporosis

Effective Sept. 28, 2009, a presumption of service connection for osteoporosis for FPOW’s who were detained or interned for at least 30 days and whose osteoporosis is at least 10 percent disabling is established.

Robert Mitchell is director of the Saratoga County Veterans Service Agency. Contact him regarding veterans affairs at 884-4115.