Four decades after the war in Vietnam ended, farmers in Quang Tri province, one of the most heavily bombed places in the history of warfare, still struggle with the threat of unexploded ordinance and with the health effects of Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide and defoliant, says The Nation. “They were walking into a death trap,” writes George Black, editor-at-large for The Food and Environment Reporting Network, which partnered with The Nation on the piece. “Ten percent of the munitions that rained down on the province failed to detonate, so there was the constant risk of stepping on a piece of unexploded ordinance ….They also had no idea how dioxin, the lethal contaminant in Agent Orange, might blight their lives down through three generations.”
Black correlates flights that sprayed Agent Orange with villages where large numbers of families have as many as four or five children with birth defects. The flight data was compiled by Jeanne Stellman, professor emerita at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, who says no comprehensive epidemiological study has been conducted in Vietnam of the effects of Agent Orange, which was often used at up to 10 times the recommended application rates. The United States government, which has long denied that Agent Orange is connected to health problems in Vietnam, has committed funds to clean up “dioxin hot spots” at airfields, and will distribute new humanitarian support for Vietnamese with serious birth defects and disabilities, which would include those due to Agent Orange. (FERN publishes the Ag Insider.)