Dioxin Affecting Vietnamese / DMN

[Guest guest]

Dow's Damage of Humanity Seems to Last Forever! MM - Comment

Monday | September 10, 2001

Dioxin affecting Vietnamese not exposed to Agent Orange Dallas researcher finds 'incredibly large levels' 30 years after sprayings 09/10/2001 By RANDY LEE LOFTIS / The Dallas Morning News

A Dallas researcher is piling up more evidence that Agent Orange, which U.S. troops sprayed more than 30 years ago to obliterate jungles in Vietnam, is still exposing new generations of Vietnamese people to highly toxic dioxin.

Related content• Fattier ice cream has more dioxin

New test results on people living near the site of a U.S. air base at Bien Hoa City in the former South Vietnam confirm high levels of cancer-causing dioxin in groups never exposed to the original spraying: children born after the war and adults who moved to Bien Hoa from the north, where no Agent Orange was used.

The air base at Bien Hoa, a city of 390,000 people 22 miles northeast of Ho Chi Minh City, was an Agent Orange storage center. As much as 7,000 gallons of Agent Orange – named for the orange stripes on its barrels – spilled there in 1970.

Test results received last week confirm earlier findings by dioxin researcher Dr. Arnold J. Schecter of Dallas that dioxin exposure from Agent Orange is an ongoing problem for many Vietnamese, not just for those who were there when spraying took place.

Of 35 Bien Hoa residents for whom test results are in, 33 had elevated dioxin levels in their blood. Among a comparison group of people living in Hanoi in northern Vietnam, only one showed elevated dioxin – and that amount was still more than 10 times lower than the lowest level found in Bien Hoa.

"It shows that people are still getting large amounts of dioxin 30, 40 years afterwards," said Dr. Schecter, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Texas School of Public Health at Dallas. "These are just incredibly large levels."

Dr. Schecter, who did the study with dioxin researcher Le Cao Dai of the Vietnam Red Cross and other scientists, was scheduled to present the findings at an international dioxin conference that convened Sunday in Kyongju, South Korea.

The study is part of Dr. Schecter's 17 years of research on Agent Orange, a herbicide mixture that U.S. troops sprayed on about 10 percent of southern Vietnam to wipe out forests where enemy forces might hide.

From 1962 to 1971, the United States sprayed 15 herbicides in Vietnam, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The department says Agent Orange, used from 1965 to 1970, accounted for most of the 20 million gallons sprayed.

U.S. soldiers and airmen who mixed or sprayed Agent Orange, as well as the Vietnamese people who were in the sprayed areas, have been the subject of health concerns since the time the spraying occurred.

Agent Orange was contaminated with a type of dioxin – a family of powerful, long-lasting and cancer-causing substances – known as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD.

TCDD, an industrial byproduct, is the most toxic and most studied of the 20 dioxin or dioxin-like compounds found in virtually all people's bodies. The Environmental Protection Agency's new scientific reassessment of dioxin, due out soon, calls dioxin a human carcinogen. The substance also is linked to other serious health risks.

Previous research has found declining dioxin levels in Vietnamese people. However, "recent blood, soil and sediment samples from Vietnam strongly suggest a reversal of this trend," according to an abstract of Dr. Schecter's latest study, "with current as well as previous exposure of Vietnamese people and the environment."

Researchers speculate that dioxin in the soil contaminated groundwater and then made its way into surface waters, where people caught fish as a main food source. Highest levels were found in people who ate fish from a river adjacent to the air base site.

People who ate locally caught fish had dioxin levels in their blood as high as 271 parts per trillion, 135 times higher than the level for people in northern Vietnam who were never exposed to Agent Orange.

Children in Bien Hoa who were born at least nine years after the spraying ended had dioxin levels 29 to 44 times higher than unexposed Vietnamese. One child born in 1988, 17 years after the last spraying, had 34 times the level of unexposed people.

Chemical tests show that Agent Orange was the only possible source of the dioxin, Dr. Schecter said. Further research is needed to isolate which fish contain the dioxin and exactly how the dioxin reached the river, he said.

Dr. Schecter said the findings at Bien Hoa suggest that similar problems might be occurring at Vietnam's 12 to 30 other "hot spots" of heavy Agent Orange spraying or spills.

This summer, the United States and Vietnam signed a limited agreement for more research, including a conference on Agent Orange and human health to be held in Vietnam next year and some early soil sampling.

Soil tests could eventually set the stage for talks over the need for massive environmental cleanups in Vietnam – and over who should pay for them – as well as more medical research on what Dr. Schecter calls a public health emergency.

"Vietnam is the largest dioxin lab in the world," he said.