PARIS : Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals sprayed by the US
army during the Vietnam war three decades ago still pollute the
soil and damage people's health, experts said.
"A war of disease charts followed the war itself," said one
participant in a two-day conference on the health effects of
war-era chemicals with high dioxin levels dumped on Vietnam, which
opened in Paris on Friday.
Between 1961 and 1971, the US army spread more than 100,000 tons of
toxic chemicals, "constituting the greatest chemical warfare ever
known to mankind," the general secretary and vice president of the
Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA), Tran Xuan
Thu, said in an opening address.
Tran told the conference, organized by the Association for
Franco-Vietnamese Friendship, that 80 million litres of 20
different chemicals were dropped on a quarter of the total surface
area of what was then South Vietnam.
He put the number of people directly exposed at "between 2.1 and
4.8 million".
The US army used Agent Orange in the 1954-1975 Vietnam war to clear
the jungle and prevent enemy forces from being able to use the
dense foliage for cover.
Explaining that Vietnamese authorities had analyzed more than 1,000
soil samples, Tran said the concentrations of dioxin - one of the
most dangerous poisons in existence - "reached the highest level in
the world".
Dioxin levels in Vietnam have since dropped significantly, but Tran
warned that its half-life was "up to more than 20 years" and that
it could penetrate the ground to a depth of up to two metres.
Cancer, immune deficiency disorders, birth defects, miscarriages,
nervous system disorders and chloracne - an acne-like skin
complaint - are often cited as possible consequences of dioxin
exposure.
But experts say Vietnamese studies do not get the attention they
deserve due to a lack of publication in internationally recognized
scientific journals.
Exposure to Agent Orange can result in chronic lymphocytic leukemia
(CLL), the US National Institute of Medicine, which is linked to
the National Academy of Sciences, said in a 2003 report.
The report, based on a reassessment of six studies of herbicide
exposure, concluded there was "enough data to support an
association of exposure to these chemicals and the development of
CLL", a form of cancer of the blood.
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, director of the Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi
Minh City, said five common birth defects had been spotted in
Vietnam's newborns, basing her assessment on research dating back
to the 1980s.
Of 294 children exposed in the womb to Agent Orange, 5.4 percent
suffered from malformations, against 0.4 percent of 6,690 children
not exposed to the toxic chemical, the gynecologist said.
The death rate for fetuses exposed to Agent Orange was also
substantially higher - 0.34 percent against 0.02 percent for those
not exposed, she said.
Another study of two groups of women from the same region in
Vietnam showed that the risk of defects was 10 times greater for
women born and nursed during the US campaign than for women born
and nursed between 1938 and 1963. - AFP