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C H A P T ER 19 “People Lost Track of What Was True” The Agent Orange Research, Part 1 What was happening at the Agent Orange project was we were continually speaking out of different sides of our mouths and it became quite a problem. —Dennis Smith, former CDC researcher1 We’ll probably never know for certain whether Agent Orange harmed the people who fought and lived in Vietnam. It’s not because the necessary research couldn’t have been done; it just wasn’t done properly. Politics trumped science, and we’re all the poorer for it. A CDC birth defect study, involving the children of Atlanta veterans, was released in 1984, a few months after the class action settlement but before Judge Weinstein published his opinion finalizing the deal. The judge cited this research when arguing that the veterans’ children were lucky to get any money at all. This was both a Vietnam experience study (the kids of every man who’d served in that war were combined into a single cohort), and an Agent Orange study, using a preliminary exposure index being developed by CDC. The researchers found no increase in total birth defects. This study, however, had “only a weak ability to demonstrate even modestly increased risks. Therefore, the fact that none have been demonstrated may reflect the weaknesses of the study, rather than a true lack of effect. The present study included a relatively large number of people, but the estimates of Agent Orange exposure were probably rather inaccurate. Thus, the conclusions regarding possible Agent Orange-associated risks for Vietnam veterans that can be drawn from this study are rather weak. “This study does, however, provide strong evidence that Vietnam veterans, in general, have not fathered babies with all types of birth defects combined, at higher rates than other men. Thus, if any increased risks were caused by exposure to Agent 178 Orange, they are small, limited to select groups of veterans, or occur only with specific rare types of defects.”2 This statement was more reassuring than the actual results. The researchers found higher incidences of the following abnormalities in the children of Vietnam veterans: cleft lip; microcephaly (abnormally small head); spina bifida (failure of the spinal cord to close); bent and immobile limb joints; missing eyes; cleft of the eyeball; congenital cataracts; missing lung; narrow aorta; anomalies of the ear, bile ducts, liver, hair, and gall and urinary bladders. Some of these increases were even higher for the children of veterans who remembered being exposed to Orange. But none of these findings were statistically significant. It would have been wrong to proclaim these increases as real; but it was just as wrong to dismiss them, particularly since any positive results would necessarily be diluted in a study that included everyone who had served in Vietnam. At the very least, these defects needed to be looked at more carefully. And there actually was one significant finding, although it didn’t involve a particularly awful deformity. The children of Vietnam vets had more fingernail and toenail defects. These same kinds of abnormalities would later be identified in the children of Asian mothers exposed to high levels of PCBs and furans, both close relatives of dioxin. And when CDC scientists applied their new, untried exposure scale, they did find some significantly greater risks, for spina bifida, cleft lip (with or without cleft palate), neoplasms (potentially malignant cell growth), and a few other defects. In addition, veterans who believed they had been exposed to Orange had a statistically significant risk of fathering more than one child with birth defects. But the study’s authors concluded that these findings were irrelevant: “We found some statistically significant results; however, they may not be biologically significant. It must be kept in mind that many hypotheses were tested in this study, and some statistically significant differences were to be expected, even if no true differences in risk exist in the populations. A statistically significant result does not necessarily mean that there are true differences in risk.” It’s true that a complex study, analyzing many possibilities, may well come up with a false positive or two. But it’s bad science simply to label those findings as mistakes without following them up. Peter Kahn, a Rutgers University biochemist and lead scientist for the New Jersey Agent Orange Commission, later told Congress, “From the data in hand at the time, the CDC could not distinguish a real finding from a fluke...

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