Effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people
Agent Orange is a chemical weapon most notably used by the US armed forces during the Vietnam War, classified as defoliant. Its primary purpose was strategic deforestation, destroying the forest cover and food resources necessary for the implementation and sustainability of the North Vietnamese style of guerilla warfare. The US Agent Orange usage reached an apex during Operation Ranch Hand, in which the material (with its extremely toxic impurity, dioxin) was sprayed over 4.5 million acres of land in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971.
The use of Agent Orange as a chemical weapon has left tangible, long-term impacts upon the Vietnamese people that live in Vietnam as well as those who fled in the mass exodus from 1978 to the early 1990s. Hindsight corrective studies indicate that previous estimates of Agent Orange exposure were biased by government intervention and under-guessing, such that current estimates for dioxin release are almost double those previously predicted. Census data indicates that the United States military directly sprayed upon millions of Vietnamese during strategic Agent Orange use. The effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese range from a variety of health effects, ecological effects, and sociopolitical effects.
The most illustrative effects of Agent Orange upon the Vietnamese people are the health effects. Scientific consensus has made it clear that the importance of accuracy in terms of site-specific cancer risk as well as the difficulty in identifying Agent Orange as the cause of that specific cancer risk must be acknowledged. Previous studies on the subject have not been generalizable because though they demonstrate statistically significant increase in cancer risk, the populations have been "Western" veterans or Korean veterans, or the sample 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.
Rigorous studies have consequently been conducted to instead measure the levels of dioxin still present in the blood samples of the citizens of both North and South Vietnam. These studies indicate that though most Agent Orange studies have had myopic analyses of American veterans, Vietnamese citizens have had far greater exposure to breadth and scope of the target. The pervasion of dioxin as described by Schechter et al. (made clear in very high TCDD or 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin levels in human milk, adipose tissue, and blood as measured by gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy) in the Vietnamese people living in Vietnam is substantially greater than that of other populations (Schechter et al., 1995). Dioxin levels were corroborated in subsequent studies, most notably those conducted in areas geographically near bombing sites and spray missions during the course of Operation Ranch Hand, approximately between 1962 and 1970. A 2200 sample study of the dioxin levels in the city of Bien Hoa, a populous city in southern Vietnam located in the proximity of an air base used for spray missions, indicated noticeably elevated blood dioxin levels despite a 20-year period of peace with Agent Orange specifically being found in the blood samples. Emigrants to the city and even children born after the end of the Agent Orange spraying operations had blood samples indicating a presence of dioxin (Schecter et al., 2001). Meta-studies have affirmed the dioxin pathway of genetic inheritance, e.g. a statistically significant correlation between paternal exposure to Agent Orange and spina bifida over three case-control studies from 1966 to 2008 (Ngo et al., 2009).
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