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Agent Orange Hearings: Studies, While Nam Vets Suffer

By Mike Sutton

Despite growing thousands of Agent Orange claims, they VA ponderously and erratically continues to study the problem—and lord, how they study! The VA admits that their Agent Orange Registry (now over 68,000) is generally infective because of "coding problems." In other words, not only do they not know reliably when, where and how much Agent Orange was sprayed on the South Vietnamese countryside; but they also don't know when and where the American units were in relation to those areas sprayed.

Public Law 96-151 (enacted in December of 1979) established an Agent Orange Working Group under the lead of the Dept. of Health and Human services to bring federal departments and agencies together, and assigned to the VA the critical task of completing an epidemiological study. VA bureaucrats formed into a Policy Coordinating Committee on Agent Orange responsible for carrying out the study. The working group and VA policy Committee meet outside of public view as do similar committees springing up in other federal departments.

How then can concerned citizens follow this study? How may vets exposed to Agent Orange gauge whether there is any headway being made on their behalf? The one visible opening, outside of Congressional hearings, is the public, quarterly meetings of the VA Advisory Committee on Health-Related Effects of Herbicides (ACHREH) which met for the 10th time on November 19th, 1981 at the VA Central Office in Washington, DC.

The ACHREH panel includes, besides VA bureaucrats, scientists fro several other agencies (Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, EPA, etc) and representatives of the traditional veterans organizations (American Legion, VFW, DAV). Jon Furst, Chairman of the National Veterans Task Force on Agent Orange was included on the Committee in August, 1981.

Foremost in importance in the ACHREH meetings is the progress of the epidemiological study which still lacks a design protocol for its coordination—lack of progress would be a more accurate description. This design protocol had been contracted out by the VA to a UCLA team headed by Dr. Gary Spivey, a man whose bias against the plight of Agent Orange victims was clearly displayed in legislative testimony in California where he stated that the goal of an Agent Orange study was to "alleviate veterans' fears" over Agent Orange exposure. Members of the Veterans Coalition (some of them hunger strikers at the Wadsworth VA Hospital) and other witnesses in California, had, early on, pointed out this conflict between Dr Spivey's attitude and his contractual assignment. At the August meeting of ACHREH, Jon Furst, an observer from the National Veterans Law Center and a committee guest from the California state government all expressed concern that Dr. Spivey's attitude could taint the effectiveness of his design protocol.

Now (surprise!) Dr. Spivey's protocol has been rejected by the VA and must be redone. Vernon Houk, of the Center for Disease Control, was quoted in the Washington Post as stating that Dr. Spivey's design "had such insufficient information that we did not even classify this as a protocol."

Backing and filling, Dr Barclay Shepard, Chairman of the ACHREH and Special Assistant to the Chief Medical Director of the VA, announced at the Nov 19th meeting that the protocol was being sent back to Dr Spivey's team with a 35-day deadline for revisions. A further 30 days would then be necessary for the VA to study the revisions and decide whether the contract has been fulfilled. Despite warnings, the VA stumbled on to certain failure and now gives Spivey and his UCLA team a 65-day make-up exam.

Why does the VA find interminable study of the Agent Orange problem so attractive and testing, treatment and compensating the victims so frightening? Money is the clear answer: money!

If the Reagan administration has to treat and compensate sick vets of the last war, it might not be able to build the V-! bomber, develop the Neutron bomb, deploy the MX and draft our youth for the next one. VA Administrator Robert P. Nimmo admitted his fear of the cost should widespread harm from Agent Orange be found. He testified to the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee on November 18th, that: "We would be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars per years, going into the middle of next century." Ron Simon of the National Veterans Law Center concluded that, "The VA is simply not competent to do this study."

A VVAW observer attended the last two meetings and found the most recent to be particularly depressing. Coming on the heels of the VA rejection of Spivey's design protocol, there were many smokescreens and excuses. It was a sad contrast to the meeting in August when the Committee added the representative from the National AO Task Force; received reports on state legislation or pending legislation from Texas, New York, California and New Jersey; and of course was still anticipating approval of the protocol. Morbidity and mortality were the watchwords of the November meeting. Despite problems and delays, all seemed to agree only tat studies of morbidity and mortality could go forward.

The Department of Defense records on unit location and movements are a mess. Occupying 40,000 shelf feet of space, unindexed and unsorted, they are of no immediate value to correlate with the incomplete HERBS tapes (not to mention undocumented spraying, emergency dumping, etc). The Privacy Act restricts the release of information to individual veterans. Lumped together, these "mechanical problems" were an excuse for Spivey and a vexing shadow on the future of an effective epidemiological study.

The Air Force continues to make its Ranch Hand Study a halfway (or half-assed) project with dangerous presumptions in its technique. A cohort (or control) study will take the Ranch Hand crews who sprayed herbicides from 1962-1970 (totaling 1200 men) and compare them with a "cohort" of other Air Force personnel who served in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. This study is to be a 20-year health follow-up and a mortality study with periodic reports beginning in the spring of 1982. Air Force investigators are presuming: 1)that the non-Ranch Hands would have "low to no" Agent Orange exposure; 2) that the control group, in any event, would have had a far less dangerous "acute" exposure as opposed to the "chronic" exposure experienced by the Ranch Hands, and 3)no age-equivalent non-Air Force or non-Vietnam vets are being used as a control group. Why doesn't the Air Force get it right the first time?

Biopsy and autopsy material from approximately 400 persons had been tested by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for a report to the ACHREH in November. The pathologies of these samples had been listed and examined for clustering (unusual numbers of certain conditions) and for unique incidence (conditions which are not age-appropriate). It was noted that this is a small number of samples and not limited to veterans with in-country Vietnam service—it included, for example, two infant children. The findings from this as yet preliminary report on a small number of samples could neither prove or disprove the connection of certain pathologies to Agent Orange exposure. The VA was apologetic for the small number and imperfectly classified samples presented to the pathologists, admitting (again) that the VA hospitals still had no procedure for "tagging" those veterans with in-country Vietnam service.

Most disturbing was a report given by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the November 19th meeting of ACHREH. The EPA had run some tests on the presence of 2,4,5-T herbicide and 2,3,7,8-TCDD (dioxin) in samples of rice (from Arkansas and Louisiana), soil (from the same rice fields), gas and ash from burned refuse, and human urine and fat. Although some types of samples (notably the urine samples) shoed no incidence, in general they found it!

If the EPA involvement means that the stateside use of these substances and their effects on health are to be more closely examined, well and good; we didn't leave our concern for their danger behind with our discharge papers. The activities of Dewey Canyon IV have been expanded to protest, at the Department of the Interior, the continued use of chlorinated phoenixes in the U.S. But, for the goal of testing, treatment and compensation for Agent Orange victims, this could be the most noxious smokescreen of all. Stateside phenoxyn contamination might be cited as an excuse to deny service-related exposure claims. And, by the time the VA resorts to the dodges of Dapson and drugs (and probably lousy "C" rations as well), you my be left wondering if it was safer in Vietnam than in the 2,4,5-T sprayed fields of Arkansas and Louisiana.

Take heart. With all of the false starts, stumbling-blocks and smokescreens which are exposed at the ACHREH meetings, this noble committee seems agreed on one depressing point: the mortality and morbidity studies can continue. So you know what to do to keep these tissue samples coming in! And, in case you are run over by a tank truck filled with 2,4,5-T, it would be wise to have a note tattooed on your forehead that you were an in-country Vietnam veteran—to help out the VA with their "tagging" problem.

Mike Sutton
Washington, DC