RE: Cha^'t ddo^.c ma`u da cam

["Nguyen.Hoang" <Hoang_Nguyen@ftb.ca.gov>]

Xin go+?i ca'c ba.n ba`i ba'o Wall Street Journal dde^? tham kha?o.
Ba`i ba'o na`y co' nha^.n xe't la` ngu+o+`i My? co' quan ta^m dde^'n
va^'n dde^` Agent Orange o+? VN.  Tuy nhie^n, chi'nh quye^`n VN la.i
kho^ng muo^'n ngu+o+`i My? ddie^`u tra.  VN dda~ ti.ch thu nhu+~ng ta`i
lie^.u ve^` a?nh hu+o+?ng cu?a Agent Orange ta.i VN.  VN cu~ng kho^ng
tra? lo+`i nhu+~ng ca^u ho?i ve^` va^'n dde^` na`y.  Ddu'ng hay sai????
Hoang
========================= 

>Wall Street Journal, Feb 12, 1997:

>Birth Defects Plague Vietnam; Scientists Cite Toxic Herbicide: Report 

>Hanoi (WSJ) -- Arching her back, Nguyen Ha'lan slides off her
>wheelchair on to the floor, her legs flopping down beside her. It is
>evening, Miss Ha'lan's fussy time. She wants to play.
>
>Her father, retired Maj. Gen. Nguyen Don Tu of the Vietnamese army,
>eases the 24-year-old woman into a wooden chair that looks like an old
>elementary-school desk, latching the restraining bar across her lap. He
>gives Miss Ha'lan a pile of newspapers, which she rips into shreds,
>filling
>the house with shrieking laughter.
>
>Miss Ha'lan suffers from cerebral palsy, a brain disorder that has left
>her severely impaired since birth, both mentally and physically. Some
>evenings, when she gets too agitated, her father soothes her by playing his
>flute. But usually, like tonight, the family goes on with its business
>around her, inured to her flailing arms and unrelenting squeals.
>
>PRIME SUSPECT
>
>This is the last battleground of the Vietnam War, at least by Gen. Tu's
>reckoning. A generation after chasing off the Americans, Vietnam is
>contending with what some scientists believe could be its most indelible
>national sacrifice: damaged genes. The researchers say there has clearly
>been a surge of birth defects and other reproductive disorders here in
>the
>past 25 years, to rates that far exceed those in other Asian and
>developing
>countries.
>
>Sketchy statistics in Vietnam make this impossible to measure precisely.
>Nor can the reason for birth defects usually be known for sure. But in
>Vietnam, substantial evidence points to a chemical scourge that has
>bedeviled many American veterans of the war there: the herbicide Agent
>Orange.
>
>It saturated areas where the Vietnamese populace, unlike transient
>American soldiers, lived for years. Agent Orange contained dioxin, a
>chemical whose risks have been a matter of heated debate but one that
>many
>toxicologists now consider among the most hazardous of industrial
>substances. Vietnamese scientists believe that as many as 500,000
>children
>may have been born with dioxin-related deformities since the mid-1960s.
>
>LONG MARCH
>
>Back in 1972, then-Lt. Col. Tu was a member of North Vietnam's general
>staff based in the Demilitarized Zone, that misnamed corridor of killing
>that was supposed to separate North and South Vietnam. After his side
>captured the DMZ city of Quang Tri, he was ordered south to prepare for the
>liberation of Hue, a U.S. stronghold. Unknowingly, Mr. Tu and his men
>slogged through one of the most contaminated war zones in history.
>For the previous decade, giant U.S. tanker planes had sprayed millions
>of gallons of Agent Orange on the once-lush DMZ, to eradicate the enemy's
>jungle cover. As Mr. Tu and his group picked their way south, they ate,
>drank and breathed the toxin. For weeks, he says, it was all they could
>taste or smell.
>
>When Ha'lan, his second daughter, was born about a year later, doctors
>knew something was very wrong. But it wasn't until Gen. Tu was serving as
>Vietnam's military attache in Moscow in the early 1980s that a Russian
>doctor suggested Agent Orange might be the culprit.
>
>Like many Vietnamese, Gen. Tu today harbors more awe than ill will
>toward the U.S. He has exchanged warm letters with retired Adm. Elmo
>Zumwalt Jr., who ordered massive Agent Orange spraying and whose
>Vietnam-vet son later died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer linked to
>Agent Orange exposure in veterans.
>
>"We're in the same situation," Gen. Tu believes.
>
>NOT AN ISSUE 
>
>Gen. Tu feels strongly that the U.S. owes Vietnam help with the problem,
>but he isn't sure his own government is even asking for assistance. The
>answer: It isn't, U.S. officials say. Agent Orange, they note, hasn't
>come
>up in official exchanges between the two countries since they normalized
>relations two years ago.
>
>Vietnam once did try to study and publicize its Agent Orange problem,
>with European and Japanese aid. The U.S., emotionally spent after losing
>the war, paid no heed.
>
>More recently, American veterans' groups have prodded Congress into
>supporting some initial research on Agent Orange in Vietnam. But now
>Vietnam isn't cooperating. The Foreign Ministry here has instructed its
>officers to play down the problem, a ministry employee says. Two years
>ago,
>when some U.S.-funded scientists came here to launch a study, their data
>and specimens were seized at the airport upon their departure. Queried
>repeatedly by U.S. diplomats, Vietnam has refused to return the materials
>or explain why they were confiscated.
>
>"We've been told by Vietnamese colleagues that high levels of their
>government don't want us to talk about Agent Orange or dioxin at all,"
>says
>Arnold Schecter, a prominent dioxin expert at the State University of New
>York in Syracuse, who has made more than a dozen research trips here.
>The lost interest, he and other experts suspect, stems from Vietnam's
>determination not to do anything now that might antagonize the U.S. or
>its
>corporations, lest foreign investment here suffer. Vietnamese officials
>also fear that Agent Orange publicity could hurt booming agricultural and
>tourism trades, researchers believe.
>
>In any case, science, and its potential beneficiaries, languish.
>To untrained eyes, the old DMZ and other heavily sprayed areas show few
>signs of the chemical storm. Foliage carpets the country and rice paddies
>fill every hollow, reflecting Vietnam's sudden emergence as the world's
>third-largest rice exporter.
>
>RANCH HAND
>
>The flora's recovery belies a human legacy. The defoliation campaign,
>codenamed Operation Ranch Hand, drenched parts of South Vietnam in
>roughly
>20 million gallons of herbicide, about 60% of which was Agent Orange. It
>soaked about five million acres, mostly in 10 provinces where brush near
>U.S. bases made Americans vulnerable to ambush.
>
>The "ranch hands" who handled the herbicides had protective gear. Most
>GIs ate imported food and drank purified water. They served, on average,
>for only about one year in Vietnam. Nonetheless, about 77,000 U.S. vets
>have sought disability benefits for Agent Orange exposure, and 4,400 of
>the
>claims have been paid.
>
>In contrast with the Americans, the Vietnamese stewed in Agent Orange.
>The village of Cam Nghia in the DMZ was double-dosed. It was near a U.S.
>base, whose troops sprayed it with defoliants from trucks and on foot,
>and
>after the Americans closed the base they saturated the village with
>herbicide fog from the air.
>
>When the big spray planes swept in, the sky turned black as night, says
>Le Mit, a 48-year-old wood gatherer. Most trees shed their leaves and
>died,
>she adds, and some fruits and vegetables seemed to go genetically
>berserk,
>growing to gargantuan sizes before bursting on the vine.
>
>During air raids, villagers spent hours underground. When they surfaced,
>they ate and drank whatever they could find. Nobody told them the strange
>chemical taste in the food and water might be hazardous. "We were always
>hungry," Ms. Mit recalls.
>
>AFFLICTED HOUSEHOLD
>
>Her first son, born in 1978, died four years later of unknown causes,
>never having learned to talk or crawl. Her second boy, 14-year-old Leng,
>lies without pants on a wooden platform in the family's palm-leaf hut,
>not
>far from a black pig sitting in mud. Catatonic and unable to stand up,
>Leng
>lives in his own world, occasionally darting his torso forward to pull a
>knee to his nose or his foot behind his head. A third child,
>eight-year-old
>Tung, can't walk or talk but understands basic commands. He sits in a
>small
>chair near his brother, shielding sunlight from his eyes with his hand.
>
>It is impossible to know whether Agent Orange caused these children's
>problems. The most researchers will say is that the rate of birth defects
>is high in heavily sprayed areas like the DMZ, and that there is some
>evidence tying dioxin to reproductive abnormalities.
>
>That evidence wasn't always there. The risks of dioxin have been hotly
>debated over the years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has
>taken
>a hard line on it based on cancer studies, requiring industries to sharply
>limit output of this unwanted byproduct of combustion. Industry groups
>have
>lobbied for a less-stringent standard, noting that there are 75 different
>types of dioxin and citing studies suggesting that most of them, in
>moderate doses, aren't dangerous.
>
>The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, after years of deliberation,
>decided to award disability benefits to Vietnam vets for a range of
>dioxin-linked ailments, including certain types of cancer, various skin
>and
>neurological disorders and spina bifida, a congenital defect. Spina
>bifida
>is 2 1/2 times as common in children of Vietnam vets as in other U.S.
>children, according to a March 1996 study by the National Academy of
>Sciences' Institute of Medicine.
>
>Doubters cite Seveso, Italy, where the incidence of birth defects hasn't
>risen since a big dioxin contamination in 1976. The case is muddied,
>though, by a high abortion rate in Seveso, where women were exempted from
>Italy's abortion ban.
>
>SUGGESTIVE STUDIES
>
>Dioxin's link to fetal development has grown clearer in recent years.
>Two Dutch studies found that women with elevated blood levels of it gave
>birth to children with lower IQs than the offspring of other Dutch women.
>Studies in Japan and Taiwan found the children of dioxin-exposed women to
>have lower birth weights, smaller head circumferences, lower IQs and
>higher
>rates of physical deformities.
>
>Although Vietnam lacks statistics to make before-the-war and
>after-the-war comparisons, a 1993 study by a team of Japanese and
>Vietnamese scientists found that rates of birth defects in two southern
>Vietnamese villages were four times as high as the rates in two unsprayed
>villages in the north.
>
>Another study found that North Vietnamese soldiers who fought in the
>south had sharply higher rates of deformed babies and other reproductive
>disorders than soldiers who remained in the north.
>
>A team led by Dr. Schecter reported in 1995 that Vietnamese living in
>sprayed areas had much higher levels of dioxin in their blood, breast
>milk
>and fatty tissue than Vietnamese living in unsprayed areas. Levels
>declined
>over the years but were still high in the sprayed areas in 1992. Some
>individuals had the highest levels ever recorded in humans. Moreover, the
>particular dioxin that contaminated Agent Orange is the most toxic one of
>all.
>
>Dr. Schecter says dioxin has surely had "health consequences" in
>Vietnam. But "unless we can do solid, controlled science," he adds,
>"using
>the best techniques in cooperation with the Vietnamese, we won't know for
>sure."
>
>FAMILY TRAGEDIES
>
>Cam Nghia would be a good place to study. The village has only a few
>thousand residents, yet Ms. Mit's hut is by no means the only one with
>deformed children. In one home, a 16-year-old girl, less than four feet
>tall, cackles hysterically on the edge of a bed, her spindly legs folded
>beneath her. Asked where her parents are, she says, "Dead," raising a
>howl
>from the back of the house.
>
>There, her 18-year-old sister, similarly deformed, lies under a mosquito
>net in the dark, babbling incomprehensibly. Their brother, mentally
>retarded but mobile, appears in the front yard. Asked his age, he
>replies,
>"Two."
>
>A few years ago, a visiting teacher taught the boy, 13, to carry water
>from the well, says the children's mother, Nguyen Thi Huyen. Their father
>died of cancer in 1989; an older brother, born before the war, supports
>the
>family by gathering wood and wild roots in the countryside.
>
>In a neighboring house, 12-year-old Linh Thinh has a fine mind but legs
>that won't move. She sits on the ground, sorting beans in a basket,
>refusing to look up. Her family can't afford to take her to a special
>school 10 miles away.
>
>AT THE HOSPITAL
>
>Births of "Agent Orange babies," as they are called here, peaked in
>1985, says Ta Thi Chung, vice director of Tu Du Obstetrics Hospital in Ho
>Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. In heavily sprayed districts, she says,
>reproductive disorders of all kinds remain stubbornly high. Hospital
>officials have considered starting an outreach program to warn couples of
>the risks, but "we dare not," Dr. Chung says, because they wouldn't know
>where to begin.
>
>Measuring young couples' dioxin levels isn't an option. To do so,
>certified labs abroad charge $2,000 a sample; the budget for the
>hospital's
>entire children's ward is less than $50,000 a year.
>
>"The problem exists throughout the south," Dr. Chung says. "We can't
>tell everyone not to have children." As for abortion, by the time rural
>women with problem pregnancies make it to the hospital, that usually
>isn't
>an option.
>
>At Tu Du's German-built nursery, 14 infants in tiny wire cribs gurgle
>like normal babies. The luckier ones will have surgery for cleft palates
>and other operable defects. Others are entering the world with toes where
>legs should be and arms that end above the elbow. In the next room,
>15-year-old Viet has survived years in a vegetative state with only a
>partial torso and a head. His Siamese-twin brother was detached with
>several shared organs when they were young.
>
>GRIM SIGHT
>
>The most troubling cases are kept behind a locked door marked
>"Collection Room." Inside, jars of formaldehyde containing aborted and
>stillborn fetuses are stacked floor-to-ceiling on metal shelves,
>organized
>by type: giant heads with tiny bodies, faces without features, female
>twins
>bound at the skull. A country Vietnam's size would normally expect to
>have
>one pair of Siamese twins born every 10 years; Vietnam has had four pairs
>born since 1994.
>
>The grisliest sights are partly formed fetuses ravaged by grape-like
>tumors attacking them from their own placentas. The rate in Vietnam of this
>rare reproductive cancer, called hydatidiform mole carcinoma, is much
>higher in the south than in the north, where defoliants weren't
>sprayed.
>
>"We can't prove Agent Orange has caused these problems," says Dr. Chung.
>
>"But we have more than enough evidence to believe it has."
>The irony, says Gen. Tu, the father of Miss Ha'lan, is that the
>herbicide didn't help the U.S. much. On this point, he disagrees with his
>pen pal, Adm. Zumwalt, who has said that the defoliant saved American
>lives
>and that, despite his own son's death, he would use it again. Gen. Tu
>believes defoliation was no more than a minor inconvenience in fighting
>the
>war.
>
>Its consequences since then, he maintains, include children such as his
>own, and he believes they are something the U.S. should address. "Look
>what
>you did for Japan and Europe after World War II," Gen. Tu says. "Perhaps to
>repair the damage here is to recognize your defeat."
>
>
>
>