Dioxins During The Vietnam War

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Many of us believe that war only affects those who are struggling with it and others think that just because its effects are past should they be forgotten. Vietnam War, (1954–75), an extended battle that pitted the communist authorities of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, in opposition to the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States of America. Also known by many as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America. The Soviet Union supported the North Vietnamese army, China, and other communist allies, the South Vietnamese army helped by the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. During the Vietnam War, …show more content…
Many experts and people interested in the topic at the time, including Arthur Galston, were against herbicidal warfare because to concerns about the side effects and problems it produced to humans and the environment by indiscriminately spraying the chemical over a wide area. As early as 1966, resolutions were introduced to the United Nations charging that the U.S. was violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which regulated the use of chemical and biological weapons. They are typically manufactured as products of industrial processes and incineration. In the late 1960s, evidence linking dioxins to congenital disabilities in mice and reports of congenital disabilities in Vietnam began to arise. On October 31 of 1971, the U.S. ceased tactical herbicide missions in Vietnam. One year before this cessation, Congress had urged the Department of Defense to work in unison with the National Academy of Sciences to direct a study on possible effects of Agent Orange exposure and how may it affect other areas. This study found a relation between dioxin and congenital disabilities, but the link was deemed statistically insignificant. These results did not cause interest in Agent Orange, because obviously, this people did not interest on it to have it. Between 1979 and 1990, government departments and agencies in the U.S. helped sponsor and run over 50 studies focused on the herbicide. Although all of these research …show more content…
Scientific consensus has made it evident that the importance of effectiveness regarding site-specific cancer risk as well as the hard time they had in identifying Agent Orange as the cause of that particular cancer risk must be acknowledged and soon treated. Studies made before on the subject have not been generalizable because though they just show a statistically significant rise in cancer risk, the populations have been "Western" veterans or Korean veterans, or the average sizes were too small to be considered appropriate. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines the margin of exposure as "the ratio of the no-observed-adverse-effect-level to the estimated exposure dose." Independent scientific analyses of the epidemiology of Agent Orange suggest that there is little to no margin of exposure for dioxin or dioxin-like compounds on vertebrates, meaning that even passive contact or genetic lineage has devastating repercussions. The local scientific consensus on the effects of Agent Orange stated that scientists at the time made incorrect judgments on how destructive the chemical could be. Scientific reviews ex-post facto have indicated that many of these supposedly objective studies that conclude a beneficial use of Agent Orange based on access to still-classified documents and little else. Additionally, Koppes's research showed that these scientists continually reduced the
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