Correlation Between Dioxin And The Reported Illnesses example essay topic

In 1961, the United States began spraying herbicides in its military campaign to defoliate the jungles of southern Vietnam. Mimicking Smokey Bear, American pilots chuckled Remember, only you can prevent forests, as they dropped weed killers over target sites. But as research progressed, the true nature of the chemicals which they were spraying came to light. It is certainly no longer a laughing matter when it is realized that Agent Orange, a fifty-fifty mixture of 2, 4, D and 2, 4, 5, T usually mixed with kerosene or diesel fuel, could be as deadly to humans as it is to plants.

The military research of herbicides dates back to World War II. A grant was provided by the National Research Council to develop a chemical to destroy rice crops in Japan. 2, 4, D and 2, 4, 5, T was the result. A discussion between President Roosevelt and White House Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy determined that this heinous chemical should not be used. But in 1961 President Kennedy signed two orders allowing Agent Orange to be used in Vietnam (one to destroy crops and the other to defoliate the jungle). Defoliation stripped the jungle of vegetation.

Left barren, it no longer provided camouflage for the Viet Cong, their supply routes and base camps would be more prone to aerial attacks. Crop destruction denied the communists of local food sources. This forced them to divert more resources to provide and transport foods from other regions. But just as important, crop destruction also weakened enemy morale and forced villagers to move to cities where they could be more easily controlled. The program for spraying herbicides over Vietnam was either called Operation Trail Dust or Operation Ranch Hand.

It began in 1961 and peaked from 1967 to 1969. Various methods were employed to systematically spr a these chemicals, which were dispersed by aircraft, vehicle, boat, and hand-spraying. On ground, they were used by soldiers to clear the perimeters of their base camps. Riverboats were used to spray the riverbanks. Most damage to the jungle was done by air. The Air Force Operation Ranch Hand, as it was called, used C-123 cargo aircrafts (providers) and helicopters to drop the majority of the herbicides.

There were an estimated 19.4 million gallons dropped during the Vietnam War, sixty percent of which were Agent Orange. The average C-123 aircraft could dump eleven thousand pounds of agent orange over three hundred acres in four minutes. There were many types of herbicides used by the United States in Vietnam. Each was named after the color of the four inch band painted around the fifty-five gallon drums in which it was contained: Agent White, Purple, Blue, Green, Pink and Orange. The effects of the spraying on the jungle were immediately recognizable. Estimates show that six million acres or twenty percent of the entire land area of the republic of South Vietnam was covered with chemical poisons.

The President of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, announced that herbicides had destroyed twenty-three percent of forests in his country. Scientists from the American Association for the Advancement of Science who visited Vietnam in 1970 reported that bamboo had spread to reclaim forest floors that hardwoods once claimed. Nearly all trees of coastal mangroves were destroyed after one spraying and were not expected to return to their normal states for at least one hundred years. More than six thousand two hundred and fifty square miles of south Vietnam still can not be farmed because of defoliation. The effects of the herbicides on humans were less obvious. Agent Orange is a mixture of two major compounds- 2, 4, Dichlorophenoxy acetic acid and 2, 4, 5, Trichlorophenoxy acetic acid.

By mimicking a natural plant growth hormone, auxin, these herbicides are able to induce plants to grow themselves past their natural levels of tolerance. They were first used in the 1940's in the United States to destroy weeds in grain fields, pastures and turf. By the 1960's, these herbicides had become an important method of controlling weeds. Unfortunately, it was unknown at that time that Agent Orange also contained one of the most lethal compounds known to man, dioxin.

It's ironic that the dioxin that makes agent orange so deadly isn t even an intended part of the plant killer. Dioxin generally refers to a group of about seventy-five chemicals made of two benzene rings with substituted chlorine. They are by-products in the manufacture of chlorine products like Polychlorinated Biphenyl oils or the burning of chlorine containing wastes such as PVC pipes. In the production of chlorophenoxy herbicides, they were unwanted chemicals that couldn t be removed.

Dioxin is also produced by automobiles (chlorinated chemicals are deliberately added to fuels), steel mills (chlorinated solvents, cutting oils and plastics are put into the furnaces), recycling smelters for copper, lead, and steel (the products recycled in them contain significant quantities of PVC, such as cable coatings, battery casings, automobile components, and so on), sawmills (use of pentachlorophenol as a wood preservative), hazardous waste incinerators (burn chlorinated solvents or, like those that Dow operates, burn copious wastes from the manufacture of chlorinated plastics, pesticides, and other chemicals), cement kilns, industrial untreated wood burning, forest fires, and sewage sludge incineration. Dioxin is usually taken in by the ingestion of beef, dairy products, milk, chicken, pork, fish, eggs, soil and water. The toxicity of the 75 different chlorinated dioxins and 135 different chlorinated furans (related family of compounds) is highly variable. The 2, 3, 7, 8-TCDD (Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin) found in Agent Orange has been described as one of the most toxic chemicals known to man, based on animal studies.

However epidemiological studies of humans exposed to this compound have failed to conclusively attribute significant health effects except chloracne at high doses. Other dioxins, such as octachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), have very low toxicity. A study conducted by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) on roughly three thousand five hundred workers from U.S. plants that used to produced chemicals contaminated with TCDD confirmed previous findings that high exposure to TCDD resulted in significant increase in cancer deaths. NIOSH found an average increase in cancer mortality of thirteen percent in the group and an increase of sixty percent among workers with the highest level of TCDD exposure. The mechanism by which dioxin causes damage at the cellular level is not exactly known.

It has been assumed that dioxin may be stored in fat cells and is activated by internal stress to induce chromosomal and cellular damage. Whatever the case, the toxicity of dioxin is unquestioned. Even at extremely small levels, it has been proven to be a deadly poison. Animal studies have shown that guinea pigs could die by a single dose that weighs less than a billionth of their body weight.

In mice and rats, low levels of dioxin have been reported to cause decreased weight, lowered reproductive rate and internal hemorrhaging. Studies have found that, when given an oral dose of 210 ng / kg for 78 weeks, rats developed increase incidences in liver, hard palate, and tongue tumors. In 1969, the extensive use of herbicides was halted after a National Institute of Health report concluded that dioxin caused stillbirth in mice. The last herbicide operation was flown two years later.

The cessation for the use of herbicides had come too late. By then, thousands of American soldiers and countless Vietnamese villagers had already been exposed to dioxin. Americans who came in contact with this poison included those who fought in the jungles, patrolled the rivers by boat, or participated in the spraying of herbicides. Many came home and were reported to have high increases in illnesses that were extremely uncommon in the general population. In contrast to animal studies, the cause and effect of dioxin on the veterans were not well determined because the amount of exposure is difficult to quantify among those who claimed to have been ille d by dioxin.

But the correlation between dioxin and the reported illnesses are well documented. The Institute of Medicine had found that there is sufficient evidence of a statistical association between dioxin or herbicides and soft tissue sarcoma (tumors in muscles, fat, fibrous tissues, and vessels serving these tissues as well as the peripheral nervous system), non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (tumors or enlargement of the lymphnodes or lymph glands), Hodgkin's Disease (enlargement of the lymphnodes and spleen which often begins in a cervical node on the side of the neck and spreads through the body), chloracne (an acne form eruption caused by chlorine compounds), dioxin related liver disorders, diabetes (a variety of disorders linked to high or low glucose levels), malformations and other reproductive and developmental effects and endocrine disruption (malfunction of the hormonal system). In scientific terms, statistical association means that there is an extremely low probability, less than five percent, that the events occurred randomly. A study by the Center for Disease Control found that there is a fifty percent higher rate of non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma among Vietnam vets than vets who didn t serve in Vietnam. The Department of Veterans Affairs had provided special compensation for those who have become ill due to dioxin. Veterans who have chloracne, Hodgkin's disease, multiple myeloma (tumor normally found in bone marrow), non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, porphyria cutanea tard a (a disturbance in hemoglobin which is essential to normal functioning of the cells and tissues of the body), respiratory cancers, soft tissue sarcoma, acute and subacute peripheral neuropathy (abnormal changes in the peripheral nervous system), and prostate cancer could qualify for monthly payments.

The VA does not require that veterans prove that they were harmed by dioxin. It is assumed that all personnel who served in Vietnam have been exposed to it. The believed amount of time for dioxin to leave the body naturally (by either being metabolized or eliminated by normal biological processes) is 8.7 human years (determined by the Ranch Hand follow-up studies). Unlike their American counterparts, Vietnamese victims were exposed to dioxin on a long term basis. It is believed that the chemicals remained on the ground for twelve years.

Each year, monsoon rains would spread the chemicals to uncontaminated areas by flushing it into streams and rivers. Many health experts believe that dioxin is in the food chain of southern Vietnam. It is carried in drinking water or by the fish caught in contaminated streams. but relatively little is known about the effects of dioxin on the villagers that were sprayed on. In part, this is due to their isolation from local authorities and hospitals. The Vietnamese veterans and their families, however, did file a class action suit against seven chemical companies: Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Uniroyal, Hercules, Diamond Shamrock, Thompson Chemical, and T.H. Agriculture. It was settled out of court in May 1984 for victims and families of those exposed to herbicides for one- hundred and eighty million dollars (of which the lawyers got a staggering one hundred million dollars... go figure).

The amount given to the qualifying was pathetic. For example, A woman whose husband suffered, and eventually died, leaving her and three children was given just over three thousand dollars. And another man who suffered from a brain tumor and other herbicide related diseases for over three years was given only one thousand eight hundred and sixty dollars. And in another case a platoon that operated in a part of Vietnam that had been heavily sprayed has had five of it's twenty members diagnosed as suffering from dioxin poisoning.

That's twenty-five percent. That's five hundred percent above that national average for these types of disorders. This in itself is scary but the researcher was only able to locate six of the twenty members of his platoon. How many of those that weren t contacted had similar symptoms Veterans tell story after story of veterans who suddenly age. Their hair falls out in clumps, what remains turns white. They suffer from strange nerve disorders, irritableness, weight loss, palsies and finally, death.

None of the five men found from that platoon were given any kind of compensation from the Agent Orange Veteran Payment Program. Perhaps the most extensive long-term damage of dioxin was done to the second generation victims. It has been found that Vietnam veterans generally have lower sperm counts that those who didn t serve in the war. In addition, their children have been more prone to birth defects pertaining to the skin, nervous system, heart, kidneys and oral clefts. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is four times more likely in those born to Vietnamese veterans. Difficult and premature births are a commonality at the Tu Du Obstetrical and Gynecological Hospital in Vietnam, which receives the bulk of the patients who received the largest amounts of defoliants in Vietnam.

A hospital study in 1987 found that thirty percent of the seventeen thousand babies delivered at the hospital were either difficult of premature. The comparative rates of all south Vietnam is ten percent and for the whole country, it is eight percent. Instances of birth defects are also extremely high at the hospital. Here, infants born without arms, legs, shoulders, and ears have all been found. Others have been born with gross cleft palates or were hydrocephalic (water on the brain).

In 1987 alone, forty infants suffered from neural tube defects (abnormality of the fallopian tubes), forty from cleft palates, and thirty-two from malformation or absence of arms and legs. Every year since 1975, the hospital has been the site of five or more siamese twins. Physicians at the hospital report that a deformed fetus is delivered every two to three days. A room at the hospital contains jars which store aborted and full fetuses with atrocious genetic defects.

For us, they are reminders of what happens when one tinkers with mother nature.