Comparing Apples To Agent Orange?
Mustard gas, dioxins and death. What we can learn from history on exposure to chemical mutagens. (Part 1)
This is the first installment of a series in which I dive into infamous historic events. All involving known or suspected mutagenic substances and the subsequent tragedies that unfold.
The purpose of this series is to prove to the reader beyond any shadow of a doubt that…
a) Governments and big corporations will go to great lengths to avoid responsibility and culpability for dreadful and serious crimes.
b) This occurrence is not uncommon. It has happened once. It has happened twice. It has happened three times and strike! And even then it just keeps on happening over and over again.
c) Acute or immediate symptoms may appear mild and relatively rare. Yet later, become serious, debilitating and widespread burdens.
IN THIS SERIES WE WILL DISCUSS
Agent orange (Dioxin)
Asbestos and Wittenoom
Mustard gas and radiomimetic experiments
Isocyanates and the Bhopal chemical tragedy
Thalidomide
Fluoroquinolone antibiotics 'Floxed'
TO BETTER UNDERSTAND
What these substances are and why they were developed and used
The first and earliest signs something was going wrong
The mechanism of action or the pathophysiology of these toxins on the human body. How they cause disease and how it might be prevented or managed.
The unwillingness to accept liability and the lengthy legal battles between industry giants, governments and the victims.
The voices of the vulnerable and their ongoing struggle to get help.
Mutagen: an agent (such as a chemical or various radiations) that tends to increase the frequency or extent of genetic mutations.
Mutagens form a part of the genotoxic family, like carcinogens (substances that cause cancers) and teratogens (substances that cause birth defects). Exposure to mutagens sometimes presents with acute adverse effects, but often these effects are mild or virtually non existent until many years later. Then and only after a period of laying silent and dormant inside the victims body do these trojan horse like substances creep out and slay. The effects of these substances are varied and differ from case to case and in some instances the science and pathophysiology of what actually occurs at the intracellular level is still poorly understood. A mystery left unsolved.
However we continue to have ongoing issues with these poisons. It is clear they’re out there causing harm and attempts should be made to minimize or otherwise remedy this harm. Yet action is a costly endeavor, both on the environment, communities and individuals. So instead of problem framing, we only see lots of pointing and blaming. People go on getting sick and hurt. They go on forced to pay for special care, for pills, hospital stays, surgeries and an assortment of other bills. And I don’t think this is good enough. It needs to stop.
AGENT ORANGE AWARENESS DAY!
August 10 is Agent Orange Awareness Day
Meant to recognize the date in 1961 when the deadly compound was first used in Vietnam and troops were first exposed.
A statement from the organizers at Missouri’s National Veterans Memorial said that the monument will “go orange” at sunset that day.President Jimmy Carter signed off on a study of Agent Orange for the Department of Veterans Affairs that became the basis of the Agent Orange Act of 1991.
The statement said that no official way to commemorate the date has been established, but the memorial is inviting the public to join them on August 10 to honor those were exposed to the substance.
ABOUT AGENT ORANGE
So what is Agent Orange?
Named for the orange-striped barrels in which it was shipped, Agent Orange is a herbicide that the U.S. military used during the Vietnam War to destroy enemy food crops and kill jungle vegetation that concealed North Vietnamese forces. Beginning in 1961, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces sprayed 20 million gallons of it and other herbicides over vast areas of South Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambodia. The spraying denuded more than 8,600 square miles of jungle and croplands. The U.S. military stopped using Agent Orange in 1971 after the National Institutes of Health found that it contained a chemical contaminant that caused birth defects in lab animals. By then, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese civilians had been in contact with the stuff, many of them so oblivious to its dangers that they bathed in water stored in the empty barrels.
How toxic is it?
Agent Orange contained the dioxin TCDD, one of the most toxic chemicals ever manufactured. Dioxin remains in the soil and in the body for decades, and studies have linked it to numerous cancers and birth defects, as well as neurological illnesses like Parkinson's disease. "It has widespread effects in nearly every vertebrate species at nearly every stage of development," said Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
During the war, Vietnamese doctors began delivering babies born with no limbs, no eyes, or even no brain. Even now, said Vietnamese obstetrician Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, the breast milk of mothers in areas sprayed with Agent Orange 40 years ago contains dangerously elevated levels of dioxin. "It is a cruel destroyer of all life in my country," she said.
The ongoing battle of Vietnam veterans
Not only are the Vietnamese unhappy with the U.S. military's reluctance to own up to the damage wrought by Agent Orange on their communities. Many American Vietnam veterans are too. For years, the U.S. military, citing research by Dow Chemical, denied any link between exposure and veterans' illnesses. In 1991(30 years later) however, Congress passed the Agent Orange Act, which lists more than a dozen cancers and other illnesses for which the VA must compensate veterans. But veterans groups say the VA takes years to process their claims, and many vets die before they see the money. Of the nearly 500,000 Vietnam veterans who died from 2000 to 2007, 58 percent were younger than 60. "The mantra of the VA," said Paul Sutton, former chairman of Vietnam Veterans of America, "is delay, delay, delay, until they all die."
Harm caused by Agent Orange
Short-term exposure of humans to high levels of dioxins may result in skin lesions, such as chloracne and patchy darkening of the skin, and altered liver function. Long-term exposure is linked to impairment of the immune system, the developing nervous system, the endocrine system and reproductive functions. - WHO
Recently updated guidelines for Veterans seeking help with illness or disability related to exposure name fifteen conditions known to be associated with exposure to agent orange and dioxins. But there are thought to be numerous other conditions related to exposure which are not yet accepted as not enough data is there to support compensation.
But how is the harm caused?
Despite years of ongoing research, the exact mechanism involved in dioxin toxicity is still poorly understood. Without understanding the mechanism causing the harm, any disease or toxic process cannot easily be reversed or treated.
There are now arguments for epigenetic changes being observed, the switching on and off of particular genes, changing the cells behavior as it passes instructions down from within the genome. The DNA doesn’t change per se, but the way its instructions are read and interpreted within the cell appears to be lost in translation.
The biological mechanism underlying these phenomena are epigenetic transgenerational inheritance processes, a form of non-genetic inheritance. Epigenetics is defined as molecular factors or processes around DNA that regulate genome activity, independent of DNA sequence, and are mitotically stable. Epigenetic transgenerational inheritance involves the transmission of an altered epigenome and phenotypes through the germline across generations in the absence of continued direct environmental exposures.
You can see this theory being generally accepted by government organizations and other health officials even without the underlying mechanism fully understood.
The only thing that is now indisputable is that dioxins cause increased rates of the syndromes and diseases discussed above. Large meta-analysis studies show this.
Results of this meta-analysis combining data from 22 studies support the hypothesis that exposure to Agent Orange is associated with a statistically significant increase in the risk of birth defects, with a significant heterogeneity of effects across study populations. The result complements a previous finding that the risk of spina bifida, a specific birth defect, was elevated with Agent Orange exposure.
THE UGLY SIDE OF BUSINESS
U.S. veterans, while in Vietnam, were told not to worry and were persuaded Agent Orange was harmless. But after returning home, Vietnam veterans began to suspect their ill health or the instances of their wives having miscarriages or children born with birth defects might be related to Agent Orange and the other toxic herbicides they had been exposed to in Vietnam. Prior to the beginning of the Vietnam war, there had been hints dioxin could have dangerous consequences after a Monsanto plant exposed more than 200 workers to dioxin contaminated herbicides, causing severe skin lesions.
Chlorinated dioxins form as an unintended byproduct of waste incineration and a variety of industrial processes, including smelting, chlorine paper bleaching and pesticide manufacturing. Burning household waste and even forest fires can also produce dioxins. Sometimes described as the most toxic contaminant ever found, dioxin has been linked to multiple outbreaks of disease and cancer triggered by high-level exposures at least as far back as 1949.
Veterans began to file claims in 1977 (16 years later) to the Department of Veterans Affairs for disability payments for health care or treatments for conditions they believed to be associated with exposure to Agent Orange but their claims were denied unless they could prove the condition began when they were in the service or within one year of their discharge. For many this was impossible.
And since at least 1978, several lawsuits have been filed against the companies which produced Agent Orange, among them Dow Chemical, Monsanto and Diamond Shamrock. The corporate defendants sought to escape culpability by blaming everything on the U.S. government.
The chemical companies also denied that there was a link between Agent Orange and the veterans’ medical problems. However, on May 7, 1984 (23 years later) seven chemical companies settled the class-action suit out of court just hours before jury selection was to begin. The companies agreed to pay $180 million as compensation if the veterans dropped all claims against them. Slightly over 45% of the sum was ordered to be paid by Monsanto alone. Many veterans who were victims of Agent Orange exposure were outraged the case had been settled instead of going to court and felt they had been betrayed by their lawyers.
By April 1993 (32 years later), the Department of Veterans Affairs had compensated only 486 victims, although it had received disability claims from 39,419 soldiers who had been exposed to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam.
**If you do the math, $180,000,000 divided by 39,419 veterans equates to a payment of $4,566 each.
THE VOICES OF THE VULNERABLE
In this tale of toxins and terror, there are three distinct categories of victims left behind in its wake.
Firstly there are the woes of the soldiers who served and their many chronic health condition related to service in Vietnam and the direct exposure to the herbicidal products. And of course this applies to Vietnamese, Laos and Cambodian civilians who were unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time whom suffered a similar fate from direct exposure.
There are the second and third generations. The children and grandchildren of those directly exposed in those dark years between 1961-71. Whose birth defects and chronic conditions typically appeared much earlier in life, often in childhood and continuing unmitigated indefinitely.
Finally there are also those living in South East Asia who were not exposed directly but indirectly due to the persistence of dioxins within the food chain, groundwater, fish, birds and other game meats. They themselves have become exposed via eating contaminated materials and so too are their born or unborn children and grandchildren.
It is unknown exactly how long these toxins will persist within the populations and perhaps in future generations and with enough time these effects are watered down and become less and less. But this is a nice and hopeful idea. No certainty that this will occur exists anywhere. Without a true and correct understanding of the genetic toxicology of dioxin. This is guesswork and speculation at best.
Here, a link leads to an external page with a heap of short videos recounting victim testimonies. There you can listen or watch the testimonies and how harm has come to pass across multiple generations and the difficulty and burden on everyone involved.
I would also strongly encourage your attention towards the recent (2020) full length documentary by directors Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna. The People vs Agent Orange documentary If the link doesn't work due to copyright laws another link is available here on Rumble
Here you can see, not only that the release of toxins didn’t stop with the war. Much of it was repurposed and released in other wildlife areas including within North America.
But you can also see how industries used propaganda, blackmail and other scare tactics to intimidate or discredit concerned citizens and their protests.
SUMMARY
What these substances are, why they were sold and used.
Dioxins are by-products of herbicide manufacturing, especially common when shortcuts are taken to increase the speed and rate of production, and were unleashed on a large scale as a tactical defoliant during the Vietnam war.
The first signs something was going wrong.
The earliest indications came from the exposed workers at a US based Monsanto chemical plant in 1949 and then again during the earliest onset of the Vietnam war with skin lesions and chloracne. Evidence of Birth defects first appeared around the years 1970-71 which prompted the military to abandon their tactical spraying.
The mechanism of action or pathophysiology of these toxins on the human body.
Dioxin is epigenetically toxic in nature, no observable mutagenic effects or other genotoxic effects have been consistently observed or reproduced on testing. It however is recognized internationally as a carcinogen. And there is ample evidence of teratogenic effects in the numerous mammalian birth defects being observed.
The unwillingness to accept liability and the lengthy legal battles between industry giants, governments and the victims.
Is clearly observed throughout this article and many attached references. Both in the ignoring of health risks before and during use as a defoliant, but also in the finger pointing and blaming that resulted in decades of ongoing harm and financial burdens after. And unresolved environmental contamination still persists throughout Southern Vietnam and into Laos and Cambodia even now.
The voices of the vulnerable and their ongoing struggle to get help.
Can be heard more vocally now, many years later and will likely persist for years to come. Until the mechanism that causes dioxins genetic toxicity are completely understood, the process continues to be passed from parent to offspring and persists through environmental contamination. The victims suffer from either birth defects or health syndromes or early onsets of cancers. These conditions all have unique life altering consequences that lead to numerous burdens including medical bills, inability to pursuit recreational activities, the costs associated with special education and rehabilitation and risk of early death.