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Study Shows Agent Orange Still Taints Aging C-123s
__roo writes "Herbicides used in Vietnam in the 1970s still pose a threat to servicemen, according to a study published Friday. The U.S. Air Force and Department of Veteran Affairs denied benefits to sick veterans, taking the position that any dioxin or other components of Agent Orange contaminating its fleet of C-123 cargo planes would have been 'dried residues' and unlikely to pose meaningful exposure risks. According to the lead researcher, 'The VA, whether out of ignorance or malice, has denied the entire existence of this entire branch of science. They have this preposterous idea that somehow there is this other kind of state of matter — a dried residue that is completely inert.' To show that such exposures happened, her research team had to be 'very clever.'"
if it was a private company that did not have a fascist relationship with the government you know the EPA would be all up in their asses
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Not saying that dried residues aren't dangerous, but the researcher's quote in the summary comes off as extremely disingenuous.
Of course being exposed to dried residues will result in much lower levels of exposure than being REPEATEDLY DOUSED with liquid herbicide as were field infantry in the Vietnam war.
Toxicology is all about maximum safe dosages - scary sounding toxins like arsenic, radon, dioxin, mercury, and even radionucleotides are pervasive in our environment. The question is whether the level of exposure is biologically significant or not. While the VA's contention that the levels of exposure to Agent Orange residues is safe is a valid matter for debate, they nowhere claim that it has magically transformed into some heretofore unknown state of matter.
I'm a 'Nam vet and I get all of my health care from the VA. With very, very rare exceptions, everybody I've dealt with over the last several decades has understood that if it weren't for people like me, they wouldn't have their government jobs. Once in a while, I'll grant, there's a paper-pusher who's more interested in making sure that the forms are filled out than in giving good service, but almost everybody who is involved in caring for veterans and their dependents gives good, prompt, cheerful service. If the VA has been denying that dioxins in C-123s is a hazard, there are many possible reasons, but malice is the least likely of all. As in everything else, ignorance is always a much more probable reason.
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My father was a service connected disabled (both physical and mental) WW2 Vet and I would strongly disagree with this assessment. I took care of him for many years and struggled with the VA - although they did increase his pension towards the end.
The VA psych doctors were compassionless, unprofessional and bottom of the class grade doctors and I would often have to research the drugs they were prescribing and inform them of the side-effects and suitability to his condition. They eventually killed my father by over prescribing drugs like Haldol and other harsh psychotropics.
Yet *another* reason not to serve in the military.
All I can say is, what I reported is not just my own personal experience, but that of every vet I know who uses the VA. I'm sorry that you ran across a set of bad apples, and that they did your father's condition so much damage. And, I'll agree that the psych departments are probably the worst; I needed help from them at one point and I had to fight with the person doing the original write-up to get her to describe my complaints as I told them to her, instead of re-writing them to fit her own pre-conceived ideas. (She simply couldn't understand that I could be unemployed, broke and depressed without being violent and/or suicidal.)
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All I can say is, what I reported is not just my own personal experience, but that of every vet I know who uses the VA. I'm sorry that you ran across a set of bad apples, and that they did your father's condition so much damage. And, I'll agree that the psych departments are probably the worst; I needed help from them at one point and I had to fight with the person doing the original write-up to get her to describe my complaints as I told them to her, instead of re-writing them to fit her own pre-conceived ideas. (She simply couldn't understand that I could be unemployed, broke and depressed without being violent and/or suicidal.)
I understand we each have our experiences. Yes the psych departments are the worst.... I didn't really have a problem with the physical medical care side of things. In fact I would agree that the teams assigned to the general medical side generally do a good job.
People need to understand that wars produce causalities and those causalities need to be taken care... sometimes for the rest of their lives. A war is never over until the last person involved dies.
Unless they are somehow fundamentally different from civilian medical services, I'd be inclined to suspect that the arm of the VA that is doctors and hospitals may have a very different attitude than the arm that is essentially a medical insurance agency...
Especially if the fight is over some relatively large epidemiological class ('Post-Vietnam C-123 crews') potentially being blanket-added or default-denied, that would be where the cost-reduction guys come slithering out from under their rocks.
The VA folks you have encountered are all rank-and-file types and none of them top brass, correct? If so then your analogy is misleading, since the people we are discussing here are in fact the decision-makers and the adverse consequences of their decisions. While the rank and file folks may be very humane people, experience has (or should have) taught us that the majority of top brass in every human hierarchy are sociopaths, not humane people. Your anecdote is not representative of those people, and they are the subject here.
All I can say is, what I reported is not just my own personal experience, but that of every vet I know who uses the VA.
Did you all use the same VA hospital?
I know that the quality of the Principal heavily dictates the quality of the school. Maybe the same goes for hospital administrators.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Original article title:
Agent Orange Posed A Health Threat To Servicemen Long After Vietnam
Slashdot headline:
Herbicides used in Vietnam in the 1970s still pose a threat to servicemen
These planes were repurposed for other duties during the 70's. They went out of service in 1982. They don't "still" pose a threat because nobody is using them. The issue is for the servicemen who worked on them 40 years ago.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Psychologists everywhere are the worst. It's not the VA that's the problem, it's the profession. It needs to be purged with fire and sword.
But perhaps they could never even understand that's figurative language, because none of them took a class in literature.
The VA folks you have encountered are all rank-and-file types and none of them top brass, correct?
I won't say that I've ever encountered any of the top brass, but I have had a number of interactions with managers of various levels. In one case, a manager apologized to me for slow service, explaining that although he was authorized to have twelve clerks, upper management had only given him five, and he'd not been able to pry the other seven loose from whatever else they were doing. And once, I was complaining about how far behind a department had gotten, I was asked by a suit to discuss the issue. It turned out that this department was under investigation for exactly that, and they needed my testimony to help find out just what was happening and why. I even got a call, once, from the manager in charge of a small community clinic because I'd complained about a complete lack of common sense in their phlebotomist. (He'd insisted on taking blood samples from orders that were several years old but not signed off, even though I had paperwork with me showing exactly what tests I needed.) The next time I came in, the phlebotomist told me how sorry he was and that it wouldn't happen again.
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Sigh....In the article: "All but three of the aircraft were smelted down in 2009"
So smelt down the last three.
Dioxin is a real problem but the 34 aircraft involved and their crew is a very small
population. There are vastly more dioxin contaminated transformers and workers
scattered far and wide.
Someone is attempting to make a buck selling instrumentation in most likelihood.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Ah. I'm now priority six: broke as hell, but with a zero-percent service connected disability. I have hearing problems that can be traced back to being exposed to too much outgoing shore support back on the Gun Line in '72. It's not enough for compensation, but I do get my hearing aids and batteries for free, and get pushed ahead of people like you when I need access to a limited resource. I'm not sure, but I may have gotten a benefit from this once. After I had my first cataract surgery, I was told that they couldn't schedule my second for six months, so they put me on a waiting list. My second eye was taken care of only six weeks later. I can't be sure, of course, that I bumped somebody else, but I've always wondered about it.
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The problem with government is sometimes the business types get in charge. It's happening in my country, veteran affairs was cut back to close to nothing, no more pensions as they're too expensive. Most all offices closed down because too expensive. Large amount of Afghanistan vets committing suicide, just a cost of business and they should have been tougher. Yet the government has lots of money for PR purposes with record amounts spent on advertising how fiscally responsible they are and what a great job they're doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Despite the flames I'll get for saying it and the vehement disagreement proponents will spew, that's because psychology is not a science. Not even a little bit. The human mind is far too complex a thing for the current state of our understanding to treat scientifically. Psychologists aren't much better than snake oil salesmen.
Guess I made the mistake of saying something true :)
No, you made the mistake of thinking a doctor paid by the government is the same thing as a doctor employed by the government. Those of us who live in civilized societies know this to be false, under most (if not all) UHC schemes the government takes the role of medical insurer, not the role of care giver. The doctors and nurses are the same people under both regimes.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Psychologists everywhere are the worst. It's not the VA that's the problem, it's the profession.
Except he wasn't talking about psychologists. He was talking about psychiatrists. Not at all the same thing.
It is interesting everyone ignores the greater harm agent orange is doing to the Vietnamese servicemen.
Yes, hundreds of thousands to millions of Vietnamese were harmed depending how you count - everythings from terrible birth defects to characteristic cancers.
And, of course, the main use of agent orange in Vietnam was to destroy the farm land so that the peasants would be forced, by starvation, to move to the cities (that happened to be controlled by the USA).
No. I was referring to the fact that most of the veterans using the VA either aren't disabled or are getting treated for conditions that have nothing to do with the service, and if it weren't for us, 90% of the people working for the VA would be out of work.
Somewhere else in this thread I mentioned that I had cataract surgery done by the VA. There's a very small chance that I developed cataracts because I worked on CW radar in the Navy, but if so, there's no way of proving it. I never set foot ashore in 'Nam, so there's very little chance that my Type II diabetes has anything to do with Agent Orange. And yet, I get medical care for these and other conditions from the VA, and because I'm on a very limited income, I'm not charged. If the VA didn't provide that kind of care and only dealt with conditions that were directly related to the service, it would be far, far smaller, and that's what I was talking about.
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"And yet, Slashdot in general lauds the takeover of medicine by government."
Yes, because what he describes has nothing to do with private/public so what exactly is your point?
As a counter point, in the UK we have had major scandals with private sector care homes for the elderly where people have been abused physically and mentally and generally treated like shit left to sit in their own urine and faeces for days.
Or were you under some deluded impression that private sector is some magical saviour, with a ward against all things that could possibly be bad or go wrong?
Just because someone describes a problem with a particular public sector service doesn't mean the whole concept is faulty and flawed, nor does it mean that it could never possibly happen in private sector as well. The amount of mental gymnastics you must have had to perform to reach that conclusion based on the comment you referred to is astonishing and takes a special kind of stupid to achieve.
There is a slight difference between dropping chemicals on open jungle and dropping chemicals in the middle of the town square ... where there isn't a jungle for 4500km in any direction.
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Yep, my father used the VA medical system for pretty much everything major that happened to him after 65 or so due to very little income during his retirement years. They not only took care of his service related injuries (a land mind went off about 3 feet away from him, killing his buddy and throwing shrapnel into his leg and feet, destroying some of his toe joints) but they also performed cataract surgery, took care of several bits of cancer he had in his lungs, bladder and a couple other places, and then took care of him during his final days when we really couldn't afford to take care of him properly.
The VA took care of my father, and they take care of EVERY former member of the armed services (well, except some dishonorable discharged people). You might have to wait in line, but they will take care of you.
In my personal experience, which has been a lot of time in VA hospitals (At one point, I knew the name of every cafeteria worker working in the Gainsville Florida hospital, and where a couple of them lived thanks to them just being friendly to me in my time there.) its a shitty job they have, but they do it, and they take care of our service men.
And lets be clear, they damn well should take care of all of our service men and women, how we treat our soldiers when they return home says a lot about how we treat people in general.
We take care of our warriors. I'm proud of that fact, even if I'm not always proud of what we send our warriors off to do.
I never served in the military, I'm too much of a coward. Thank you for your service sir, regardless of what your duties entailed, I appreciate your time and dedication to our country.
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I am an analytical chemist, and analyzed Agent Orange while employed by the Dow Chemical Company (one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange). The spraying apparatus in the planes in the C-123 sprayed out a side door, and Agent Orange filled the air inside the plane drenching the men who operated the sprayers, and coated everything in the interior. Agent Orange is not volatile, and evaporates extremely slowly. This combination of circumstances IMHO would cause a residue of Agent Orange inside the planes which could reasonably last for decades.
You realize a hell of a lot of them were drafted, right?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!