The Continuing Ecological And Health Effects In Vietnam
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Agent Orange - The Continuing Ecological And Health Effects In Vietnam
Date:
Tue, 17 Sep 2002 11:14:48 -0400
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
September 12 2002
Hartford Courant
Conference At Yale To Examine Vietnam
By THOMAS D. WILLIAMS
Courant Staff Writer
American and Vietnamese scientists, veterans, health-care professionals and students will gather at Yale University Friday, Saturday and Sunday to discuss the continuing ecological and health effects of the American war in Vietnam.
The conference will take on an added philosophical dimension in light of the threat of renewed U.S. conflict in Iraq, a potential military intervention supported by President Bush. Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), in association with the Yale School of Nursing, will sponsor the Yale Vietnam Conference 2002.
The added zest arises from shared health concerns that Vietnam and Persian Gulf War veterans have. Veterans from both wars have a common interest in the U.S. military's use of hazardous chemicals and in the Pentagon's refusal to concede that potentially hundreds of thousands of these service members were exposed to such chemicals through U.S. or enemy activities.
Some 200,000 of the 690,000 gulf war veterans are reportedly suffering from a variety of illnesses, including cancer and heart and neurological diseases, and over 7,000 have died from a large number of hazardous exposures. Scientific studies say symptoms from those illnesses and deaths are consistent with service members' exposures to nerve gases, pesticides, controversial vaccines and drugs aimed at protecting them, fumes from oil well fires and dust from explosions of depleted uranium ammunition and armor.
But the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has refused to release the most up-to-date statistics, and U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4th District, is demanding their release.
In the meantime, scores of sick gulf war veterans are suing the U.S. and European chemical companies that allegedly supplied the Iraqis with hazardous chemicals they converted to sarin and mustard warfare gas.
The veterans' lawyer, Gary Pitts of Houston, has unsuccessfully pressed the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to supply the results of past United Nations inspections of Iraqis' weapons of mass destruction to help prove the companies indeed supplied the hazardous chemicals. Pitts is continuing to press for the data he says will prove the companies sold those deadly chemicals to the Iraqis.
More recently, the exposures of Vietnam veterans have developed into a wider health issue than the United States' use of hazardous jungle defoliants like Agent Orange. The U.S. Congress has been examining relatively new concerns that thousands of Vietnam era veterans were sprayed by their own U.S. military with chemical and biological hazards during 1960s Naval exercises in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
The Pentagon revealed in May that the Navy sprayed deadly chemical nerve agents, sarin and VX, on animals aboard manned ships in the Pacific Ocean during the 1960s. The tests, using a variety of simulated chemical and biological agents, are reported to have occurred repeatedly from 1962 to 1970. They caused enough concern for the Hawaiian Islands and the western coastline that the military and even the Smithsonian Institution in Washington sent out personnel to check whether birds in flight might have carried the hazards to the shore.
"The focus of most of the conference will be on Agent Orange, but we also will be looking at the entire range of toxic legacies of the Vietnam War," said Linda Schwartz, chair of VVA's Health Care Task Force and the conference's project director. "That includes birth defects in children caused by Agent Orange and other chemicals; the long-term health consequences of chronic stress among veterans; and the problems of cancer, HIV, hepatitis C, and auto-immune diseases associated with exposures encountered in Vietnam."
The conferees will discuss joint U.S.-Vietnam research projects on Agent Orange, including previous work and future activities. There also will be sessions on the link between environmental damage and human health.
"Even though peace has come to Vietnam, signs of war remain," Thomas H. Corey, national president of the VVA, said. "This conference provides a means for the people of the U.S. and Vietnam to address environmental and health concerns caused by weapons of war. Perhaps by discussing our concerns and combining our knowledge we will begin to resolve questions that have remained unanswered for too long."
To register, call the Yale School of Nursing at 203-785-5414 or via the Internet, log on to www.nursing.yale.edu/news/vwsymposium.html. Daily registration will be available for those who cannot attend the entire program.
Copyright 2002, Hartford Courant
http://www.ctnow.com/news/local/hc-agent0912.artsep12.story?coll=hc-headlines-local
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