Agent Orange Links

Impacts of Perinatal Dioxin Exposure on Motor Coordination and Higher Cognitive Development in Vietnamese Preschool Children: A Five-Year Follow-Up

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147655

Scientific Issues Relevant to Setting Regulatory Criteria to Identify Endocrine-Disrupting Substances in the European Union

http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/ehp217/

Androgen receptor CAG repeat length modifies the effect of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin on receptor activity in human prostate cells.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23117151

Dioxin induction of transgenerational inheritance of disease in zebrafish.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25194296

Molecular & Environmental Toxicology Center

http://metc.wisc.edu/

Molecular & Environmental Toxicology Center- Richard E. Peterson

http://metc.wisc.edu/people/peterson-richard-e-phd/

Impacts of Perinatal Dioxin Exposure on Motor Coordination and Higher Cognitive Development in Vietnamese Preschool Children: A Five-Year Follow-Up

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147655

Climate Change and Future Pollen Allergy in Europe

http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/ehp173/

First Agent Orange, now Roundup: what's Monsanto up to in Vietnam? Ecologist Special Investigation

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With the International Monsanto Tribunal beginning this week (14-16 October) in The Hague, MICK GRANT reports from Vietnam with this special investigation for The Ecologist five decades after the company's lethal herbicide Agent Orange first devastated the country - and discovers the agribusiness giant is sneaking its way back into Vietnam with modern herbicides and 'Roundup-Ready' GMO crops.

Today, seed has become the ultimate weapon in a war against the Earth and her people. In this war, if corporations win, we will all lose our food and our future." - Dr Vandana Shiva, Who really Feeds the World?

Flying into Saigon at night - after an absence of more than a decade - I am struck by the American corporate logos lighting up the landscape, especially those related to food and drink.
Golden Arches are sprinkled along the boulevards, and Starbucks mermaids flash their twin tails everywhere. A neon Colonel Sanders even takes on Ho Chi Minh portraits, sporting the same wispy white goatee.
As Vietnam embraces American culture, the US food gang is back in force - McDonalds, Starbucks, KFC, Coca-Cola.
And Monsanto.

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Paper Mill Cleared of Toxic Sludge Claim

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HOUSTON (CN) — Contamination from toxic sludge pits next to the San Jacinto River in Houston was not the fault of the paper mill that produced the waste, a state appeals court ruled.
Harris County and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality sued International Paper Co. and McGinnes Industrial Maintenance Corp. after the Environmental Protection Agency classified the waste pits as a federal superfund site in 2008. The EPA found that the pits, which are right next to the river, near a bridge for Interstate 10 in east Houston, had leaked dioxin into the river.
The county sought $1.5 billion in civil penalties against McGinnes and International Paper under the 1965 Solid Waste Disposal Act: penalties for every day since 1975, the effective date of the solid waste act, to the date of the EPA's superfund designation.
Just before closing arguments in the 2014 trial, McGinnes settled for $29 million, McGinnes's parent company Waste Management said in a statement.
International Paper contracted with McGinnes in 1965 to dispose of waste from its Pasadena, Texas paper mill. McGinnes was to transport the sludge and dispose of it on land McGinnes purchased.
McGinnes abandoned the site after one year, considering it worthless, the three-judge panel of the First District of Texas said in its Oct. 6 ruling. At the time, paper mill waste was not considered toxic; dioxin was not classified as a dangerous substance until 1985.
The Harris County trial court instructed the jury that International Paper did not own the waste, and the "mere fact" that it had contracted with McGinnes for its disposal was not enough to support the county's discharge theory. The county objected to both instructions.
"Again, we don't think the law permits you to escape liability whether you claimed you owned it or didn't own it," an attorney for the county said during opening statements. "It's whether you caused, suffered, allowed or permitted the pollution of the waters of the State of Texas."
But the jury found International Paper not liable for the leaking sludge pits, and said the county should take nothing on its claims.

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Dioxin, Furans, and Ailments

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For the past several years, I have been observing many people from San Carlos and Globe succumbing to the devastating illness of cancers and like problems. Even though cancer is only one disease there is a myriad of illnesses that we have in epidemic proportions here in Gila and Graham counties mainly due to the use of 2-4-5 TP chemicals (dioxin and furans) aka. ‘agent orange,’ that was sprayed in the 1960’s first in San Carlos then in the Pinal Mountains near Globe, Arizona.

In 1962, the San Carlos Apache Tribe permitted the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the US Geological Survey to test 2-4-5 TP or Agent Orange in the Gila and San Carlos Rivers. The reason for the spraying of our lands was to remove salt cedar vegetation along the river and water ways. Salt cedars soak up and use a lot of water while growing. This is why we can see the salt cedar growth along the Gila River near the Bylas Bridge in mass amounts. The Agent Orange chemical, which is dioxin and furans, has nothing to stop the growing of the salt cedars along the river. In 1970, the US Geological Survey justified the use of the deadliest chemical on earth to remove these invasive Salt Cedars but to no avail.
Rather than removing the Salt Cedar to obtain optimum water runoff from summer torrential rains, we have been invaded with many types of illnesses in our community ranging from birth defects, heart diseases, cancers of all kinds, diabetes type 1 and 2, thyroid problems, memory issues such as Alzheimer’s, and the list goes on and on. Let us come to the reasoning fact that we were used as lab rats to test the effects of the chemical on the body of Apaches and our neighbors in the Globe area in which we are dealing with the causal effect in our bodies to this very day.
Let me remind you that this is the reason why The People are dying almost daily of some abnormal disease. Furthermore, cancer, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Alzheimer’s, lymphomas, and other ailments and diseases were never hereditary until its introduction through the spraying of the 2-4-5TP chemical unto our lands, which, in turn, has soaked in the clay sediment strata, thus infecting even the vegetation, wildlife, air we breathe, the water we drink and bathe in, and everything else.

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Vets are still dying from burn-pit illnesses, advocates say

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Veterans exposed to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan are begging government leaders and the public to keep paying attention to their crippling health problems.
“We write because these veterans are seriously ill, dying or have passed away, and more must be done,” a group of 700 veterans and family members with Burn Pits 360 wrote in an open letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday. “Many of us went to war able to run marathons, but now our health has deteriorated so much that we cannot hold down steady jobs.
“We are misdiagnosed. We are not getting the medical care we urgently need. We need you to act in this, your final year in office.”
The letter comes just days after a Government Accountability Office report found shortfalls in the Defense Department’s monitoring of burn-pit victims, and asks White House officials not to let the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs “sweep us under the rug.”
It also calls for significant changes in how the National Airborne Hazards Open Burn Pit Registry is administered, to allow more families to record veterans’ post-service problems.

“We’re receiving death entries from these families on a weekly basis,” said Rosie Lopez-Torres, executive director of Burn Pits 360. “But the national registry now doesn’t allow you to input a death entry. So there is no record of (those veterans’) illnesses.”
Defense Department and Veterans Affairs officials have frequently cited the difficulty of linking troops’ illnesses to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, given the undocumented nature of what was burned in each pit and just how much exposure individual veterans had.
More than 81,000 veterans and current service members are in the registry, reporting illnesses from respiratory fatigue to rare cancers and neurological disorders.

But Lopez-Torres said she has at least 5,000 more cases that aren’t included in that list, because of the reporting restrictions.
“The burn pits are this generation’s Agent Orange, but we are seeing deaths happen after three or five years, instead of decades later,” Torres said. “We cannot afford to wait for another delayed medical study, we need the president and Congress to recognize this crisis is happening now.”

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Occidental to pay $165M toward Passaic River cleanup but $1B more needed

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One of the nation’s largest chemical companies will pay $165 million to design the cleanup plan for the lower Passaic River under an agreement reached with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, officials announced Wednesday.

The settlement with Occidental Chemical Corp. of Houston was hailed as a “milestone” by EPA officials. But the agency still has to come up with more than $1 billion to fund the massive dredge-and-cap project that is at least four years away from beginning and a decade away from completion.

EPA officials said they will soon begin negotiating financial settlements with more than 100 companies and public entities that either polluted the waterway or inherited the liability of past polluters. If the companies balk, the EPA will issue an order compelling them to fund the project.

“They are going to be paying these costs sooner or later,” EPA regional Administrator Judith Enck said during a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

The $1.38 billion project announced in March would remove enough sediment laced with cancer-causing dioxin, PCBs, mercury and other industrial pollution to fill Red Bull Stadium three times.

Those 3.8 million cubic yards would be dredged for eight miles from Newark Bay to Belleville, the worst stretch of pollution in the river’s lower 17 miles. Contaminated sediment would be taken to an out of state landfill.

When the work is done, more than half of the pollution in the river — about 6 million cubic yards of contamination ¬— will remain in the Passaic, covered with sand and other materials. The New Jersey Sierra Club has said the cap will likely degrade quickly due to the strong tidal currents in the Passaic. EPA officials stand by the plan and the long timeline until completion.

“We’re dealing with a century of pollution,” Enck said. “We need a decade to get it cleaned up.”

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Sense of Congress on Agent Orange Issue

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (NY) and Senator Chuck Grassley (IA), have introduced a non-binding Sense of Congress (H Con Res 161 and S Con Res 51 respectively) expressing support for those who served in the bays, harbors, and territorial seas of the Republic of Vietnam between January 9, 1962, and May 7, 1975, and should be presumed to have been exposed to the toxin Agent Orange and should be eligible for all related Federal benefits that come with such presumption under the Agent Orange Act of 1991. While these measures, if passed, are non-binding, it will show Congressional support for the Blue Water Navy veterans and will hopefully convince the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide this presumption by regulation.

Agent Orange Town Hall Meeting Schedule

 

Schedule

October 6, 2016

Lake Havasu City, Arizona

Contact: Casey Farrell 928-753-5239

Pat 928-716-3001

October 20, 2016

Crescent City, California

Contact : Jim Newman  541-254-1002

Tom Owen 541-619-8187

October 20, 2016

Brookings, Oregon

Contact: Jim Newman  541-254-1002

Tom Owen 541-619-8187

November 5, 2016

Ocean City, Maryland

Contact: Robert Hartman  loriandbobh@verizon.net

Bill Wolf serviceofficervva@gmail.com

November 8, 2016

Bend, Oregon

Contact :Wendy Rudy 541 706 2969

Tom Owen  541-619-8187

November 9, 2016

Santa Maria, California

Contact: Richard Segovia

rsegov11b@gmail.com

November 14, 2016

Roseburg, Oregon

Contact: Karen Hostetter

AVVA Chapter 805

541-670-1477

EPA Finalizes $11 Million Cleanup Plan for the Standard Chlorine Chemical Site

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EPA Finalizes $11 Million Cleanup Plan for the Standard Chlorine Chemical

Site in the Meadowlands on the Hackensack River

Contact: Elias Rodriguez, (212-637-3664), rodriguez.elias@epa.gov

(New York, N.Y. – Oct. 4, 2016) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a plan to clean up contamination at the Standard Chlorine Chemical Company, Inc. Superfund site in Kearny, N.J. The site is part of the N.J. Meadowlands and located on the banks of the Hackensack River. Past manufacturing operations by various companies led to extensive contamination of the site with a number of hazardous chemicals including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxin. PCBs and dioxin can cause cancer, neurological damage, and other health impacts.

The 42-acre site was used for chemical manufacturing by various companies from the early 1900s to the 1990s. Operations at the site included the refinement of naphthalene for use in the production of certain industrial products, the processing of liquid petroleum naphthalene, the manufacturing of lead-acid batteries and drain-cleaner products and the packing of dichlorobenzene products. The soil, groundwater and two lagoons were contaminated with dioxin, benzene, naphthalene, PCBs and volatile organic compounds. The site was littered with tanks and drums containing hazardous substances including dioxin and asbestos. After sampling the site and requiring short-term pollution control measures, NJDEP requested that the EPA add the site to the federal Superfund list. The site was added to the federal Superfund list in September 2007.

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October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is Agent Orange Awareness Month

Agent Orange Dump Site Is Oregon Desert's Toxic Legacy

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One of the most toxic dumps in Oregon remains in legal limbo.

A deal cut by the state with the company that owns the site has now been dropped. And the Department of Environmental Quality has no plans – or money – to clean it up.

About 60 miles north of Lakeview a barbed wire fence surrounds a patch of desert. Warning signs tell people to stay away.

Boyd Levet remembers watching in 1976 as the dump was created.

“It was probably just acres but it seemed like miles and miles of barrels just lined up in rows. It was a sight you would not expect to see in a place as beautiful as Oregon,” says Levet, who was a reporter back then for KOIN-TV.

25,513 barrels containing more than 1 million gallons of pesticide had been stacked next to Alkali Lake. They promptly started leaking.

Levet’s old news film shows the state of Oregon sent in bulldozers. They didn’t just bury the drums. They crushed them, allowing more toxics to pour out.

The chemicals include 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D – the prime ingredients of Agent Orange – notorious for its use during the Vietnam War.

Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality pushed the 25-thousand crushed barrels in trenches, then shoved dirt on top.

The trenches were not lined.

The dioxin-laced pesticides quickly reached the water table below, just 3- to 6-feet down.

“The groundwater near the landfill is very contaminated,” says Bob Schwarz, DEQ’s current project manager over the Alkali Lake Disposal Site.

The state has put up a fence around it. Tests have measured contaminated ground water spreading nearly half a mile underground. The nearest families live 3 miles away. And the town of Christmas Valley is about 30 miles to the west.

“I would say if it was near any population center, even a town as small as Christmas Valley it could very well have been declared a Superfund site,” Schwarz says.

Former Lake County Commissioner J.R. Stewart is angry that the state does not intend to clean up the chemical dumpsite.

“If it’s not affecting you it’s not a problem. Well, it’s affecting Lake County,” he says. “It’s affecting the state of Oregon and it has the potential, in time, to be a great effect and a danger. Why not remedy a very bad situation as soon as possible, rather than turn a blind eye until you absolutely get beat over the head and have to do it?”

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