Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  In an attempt to verify or supplement the information he had learned from the Desio group, Whiteside checked with scientific sources in Milan, only to be told that symptoms of dioxin exposure that had been observed in and around Seveso included “diminished white-blood-cell counts, neurological disorders of various kinds, such as blurred vision and loss of conduction time in peripheral nerve tissue… disturbances of the endocrine system, and the normal functioning of the enzymatic system. Between 1976 and 1977 the incidence of infectious disease among the affected population tripled, and this striking increase has been interpreted by some specialists as an indication of the capacity of dioxin contamination adversely to affect the functioning of the immune systems of people living in the Seveso area.”14

  The birth rate in the area has also dropped sharply, and although Whiteside writes that some physicians thought this might have been due to the increased practice of birth control by women who were afraid of bearing defective children, a study by Dr. James Allen at the University of Wisconsin has demonstrated that TCDD causes female rhesus monkeys to abort their fetuses or, in spite of repeated mating, not to conceive at all. Out of eight rhesus monkeys fed TCDD at levels of fifty parts per trillion for seven months and then mated, four suffered spontaneous abortions, two did not conceive “although they were mated on repeated occasions” and only two were able to carry their infants to term. All eight of the control group of pregnant rhesus monkeys carried their babies to term.15

  Whiteside also talked with people who lived near, but not within, the most contaminated zone and found that they were suffering from a variety of physical and emotional problems commonly associated with dioxin exposure.

  Signora Brambilla said that a number of the people in the apartment house had developed blurred vision, which made it difficult for them to watch television. “So many people seem to have disturbances here on the block,” she said. “It’s not normal at all. They get dizzy spells and headaches, and there is still a lot of diarrhea. The doctors say the people’s platelet counts are very low. They have skin problems, and when they go to the sea and it’s windy the itching is terrible—un tormento!” She said she was convinced that that there were a number of people on the block who really weren’t well, adding, “But they won’t say anything about it to the health authorities because they’re ashamed to say that they ate fruit from the trees after the accident.”16

  Even if an epidemiological study were conducted in Zone A, it would not be conclusive in accessing the damage to residents of the surrounding area because no one has determined the exact extent to which dioxin was dispersed. What is certain is that the dioxin released in the accident did not fall in neat patterns upon the residents of a prescribed area, who could then be subjected to various tests to determine the deleterious effects of dioxin on human beings. “Traces of dioxin,” wrote Whiteside, “have been found in mud as far south as Milan, thirteen miles away. Also, significant dioxin levels—whether spread directly by the toxic cloud or indirectly by the Seveso inhabitants themselves—kept turning up outside Zones A and B for months after the evacuation of the residents. And the incidence of chloracne among children of the inhabitants continued to increase.”17

  To argue that the incomplete, confusing, and contradictory epidemiological information from the Seveso accident proves that dioxin has not yet been proven harmful to human beings is rather like concluding that the accident at Three Mile Island proves that nuclear power is safe. Dioxin does not enter the body like a bullet, smashing through vital organs, splintering bone, and leaving the wounded or dying person physically helpless. Sometimes its effects are felt immediately in the form of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, bleeding from body orifices, and in just a few days the individual appears to recover completely. This seems to have been the case for many Seveso residents, but without constant medical monitoring for elevated porphyrin levels, without liver or fat biopsies, and careful statistical comparisons of Seveso residents to Italians living in nonexposed communities, how can anyone be sure that five, ten, fifteen years from now those exposed to dioxin will not begin succumbing to a host of symptoms similar to those which have damaged the health and taken the lives of Vietnam veterans? A decade ago, when the majority of Americans had returned from Southeast Asia, the claim might easily have been made that troops exposed to phenoxy herbicides suffered no adverse effects, save an occasional upset stomach, skin rash, or headache. Today that claim has been proven tragically untrue.

  On July 22, 1980, Robert O. Muller, executive director of Vietnam Veterans’ of America, told the Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Medical Facilities and Benefits about a Vietnam veteran who had tried to convince the Veterans Administration that he had been exposed to Agent Orange. The veteran had rashes on his legs and other symptoms of dioxin exposure, including recurring migraine headaches, severe chest pains, and respiratory problems. But the only treatment he had received from the VA was three and a half weeks in the psychiatric ward, and prescriptions for Valium, lithium, and sleeping pills. Unable to cope with being told that his chronic medical problems were psychiatric in nature, or with the apparent indifference of the nation for which he had fought, the veteran sent his wife and children away for the weekend and, said Muller, “put the VA prescribed pills to their final use.” Muller, whose spine was shattered by a bullet in Vietnam, concluded his testimony as follows: “Mr. Chairman, there is, and has been, human evidence on the health impact of exposure to 2,4,5-T. Now, finally, the public recognizes that the evidence exists.

  “That recognition allows us to push past the meaningless threshold debates to the fundamental questions. It allows us to stop saying, vacuously, that we need more evidence; and to start asking the serious questions: precisely how much evidence, and precisely what type of evidence, do we need?

  “The VA’s answer to this question is becoming regrettably clear. They are waiting for something like absolute certainty. The VA’s theory of some fundamental biological distinction between Vietnam veterans and the rest of the human race is, of course, laughable. But it is, unfortunately, only the final implication of the VA’s underlying quest for absolute certainty. But what is this ‘certainty’? What does it require? More importantly, is the VA’s ‘certainty’ achievable at all?”18

  Although he was speaking on behalf of his fellow Vietnam veterans, the answer to Muller’s questions, provided answers are forthcoming, will have profound implications for people throughout the industrialized world. How many studies of the effects of dioxin on rats, mice, monkeys, and guinea pigs must be done before scientists are able, or willing, to extrapolate from the results of these experiments the effects that dioxin might have on human beings? If human beings are so biologically distinct from other animals, then why bother researching the effects of dioxin at all? Why not just concede that no matter how much “anecdotal evidence” indicates a connection between dioxin and the suffering and death of human beings, there will never be “conclusive” evidence—because human beings are not rhesus monkeys or rats or mice.[21]

  According to the Environmental Defense Fund, “the American population as a whole is Dow’s guinea pig and the environment is Dow’s laboratory…” But in spite of Eriksson and Hardell’s studies of Swedish workers, warnings from the World Health Organization about the toxicity of dioxin, and outbreaks of chloracne among its own workers, Dow Chemical continues to manufacture and market a product that its own scientists have admitted contains an animal carcinogen, and residuals of which Dow’s scientists have discovered in beeff at from cattle grazed on rangelands where 2,4,5-T was sprayed. Dow’s argument for continuing the company’s crusade to keep this particular herbicide on the market is based, according to company spokesmen, not so much on profit as on principle. “We think,” said one Dow spokesperson, “that 2,4,5-T is a very important symbol. If we were to lose on this issue, it would mean that American public customs would be beaten back a couple hundred years to an era of witch hunting. Only this time the witches would be
chemicals, not people, and that’s the importance of this issue.”19

  Today we are living in a laboratory where the cancer victim must prove that his or her illness is the “direct result” of having been exposed to one of the many toxic chemicals that are spewn into our air and water, sprayed upon our food and forests, and that inundate many of the places where we work. In the name of science we seem to have banished common sense to the dustbin of “anecdotal evidence,” allowing multinational chemical companies to tamper dangerously with the ecology of our planet and the health of future generations.

  Vietnam veterans came home believing they could eventually forget the horrors of guerilla warfare and live long and productive lives. Unfortunately, for thousands of veterans the past decade has been the latency period during which dioxin would begin to slowly and then more rapidly attack their enzyme systems, damage their livers, weaken their hearts, and induce various types of cancers that would eventually destroy their young bodies. Yet it would appear that, more than three decades after 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D were first developed and marketed for commercial use and twenty years after the first defoliation mission, no institutes will be established to house scientists who might wish to examine the effects of herbicides on human health. Nor have any chairs been endowed at universities for the study of TCDD-dioxin on human beings, and it appears that no agency comparable to NASA will be funded to pay the salaries of the world’s best scientific minds while they seek to discover just what is responsible for the maiming and killing of thousands of veterans.

  “One need only to look toward the efforts of the National Cancer Institute, and its Asbestos Information Program, or the American Cancer Society and its information on smoking, or the diethylstilbestrol programs that exist nationwide.” Dr. Jeanne Stellman, associate professor of public health at Columbia University, told the Veterans’ Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, “to see what can be done if the national will, energy, and commitment are present. Surely our veterans and their service organizations, the people who served our nation at the peril of their lives, they and their families deserve the finest in research, in outreach, in information, in medical care that our country can put forth. Only minimal effort has thus far been forthcoming.”20

  Outside it is raining, and the sky has turned the color of a well-ripened plum. Dr. McNulty appears tired, his cough has gotten worse, and the frequency with which he glances at his watch leads me to conclude the interview has gone on long enough. As we shake hands and prepare to leave his office I ask if he would be willing to say that 2,4,5-T should be taken off the market altogether.

  “Well,” he replies, “it’s toxic enough that common sense would say the less the better. As far as exposure to dioxin can be avoided, it should be. And I’ll broaden that to say to the class of compounds which all appear to act alike, and that includes the dioxins and the polychlorinated dibenzofurans which are present in pentachlorophenol.[22] It’s a much bigger source of dioxin here in Oregon than 2,4,5-T. I’m willing to say what my data is to anybody at any time, provided it has passed the gauntlet and has been accepted—that is, published—by my peers. That’s no problem. I’ll do that for anybody. And if I thought there was a social danger from it, then I would feel a personal obligation to speak out. But I can’t do that just because I know dioxin is toxic and I treat it with extreme caution around here. I can’t leap to a conclusion that I feel is unwarranted on a scientific basis, that it all ought to be stopped. That’s always subject to revision, the way science is. There may be something next year or next month that will change my mind completely on that.”

  10. The Vietnamization of America

  During the height of the war in Vietnam, television crews, newspaper reporters, and freelance writers followed American and Vietnamese troops into jungles, through swamps, and up mountains. Between toothpaste and shampoo commercials, Americans could watch helicopters strafe “enemy strongholds,” see young Marines returning from an ambush or firefight, and watch the wounded being evacuated or the enemy dead counted following a battle. News coverage of the Vietnam War was so extensive, in fact, that some cynics began referring to the war as a “media event.”

  But what Americans did not see during the late sixties or throughout the seventies was the war being waged on their own environment, sometimes right in their own backyards. There were no crews from CBS to witness the Forest Service’s spraying of Bob McKusick’s homestead near Globe, Arizona, in 1968: nor were reporters on hand to observe Boston Edison’s spraying of herbicides near a heavily populated suburb south of Boston in August 1979. When the Long Island Rail Road, without notifying the residents along its rights-of-way, doused homeowners’ gardens and children with toxic herbicides, it didn’t even make the local news. Like the troops in Vietnam, those who lived near national forests, power-line and railroad rights-of-way, or privately owned tree farms had been told—if they were told anything—not to worry; herbicides were harmless.

  From 1965 until 1970, when the spraying of Agent Orange was suspended in Vietnam, the US military covered approximately five million acres of Vietnam with herbicides. During those same years, ranchers, farmers, and the Forest Service sprayed 4.1 million acres of the American countryside annually with 2,4,5-T. The Forest Service alone sprayed more than 430,000 acres of national forest every year with 2,4,5-T in an attempt to kill broadleaved plants that might block sunlight from pine and other coniferous saplings. Ranchers used 2,4,5-T to destroy anything that might interfere with livestock grazing, while rice growers sprayed it on about one hundred thousand acres, primarily in Arkansas and Mississippi, to kill parasite weeds like arrowhead, gooseweed, and ducksalad. In 1970, the USDA announced a set of limited restrictions on the use of 2,4,5-T; however, although the ban affected only about 20 percent of all 2,4,5-T used in the United States, Dow Chemical went to court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from further regulations until more testing was done.[23] Until 1979, when the EPA’s temporary and limited suspension order (which excluded rangelands and rice plantations) was issued, 2,4,5-T had been the most widely used herbicide in the country.

  When the National Forest Service first sprayed Bob McKusick’s land, he had no idea that herbicides could be harmful: “The first time was in 1968. The kids were little, and we were out on the clay deposit in Kellner Canyon with two dogs, just standing there on my properly. A helicopter came across—and we’re in plain sight—and we tried to wave it off but the spray drifted down on top of us. I had no reason to believe it was harmful because the Forest Service said it was completely harmless to birds and animals and humans and it just worked on brush. But it caused a rash, and my dog, Coyote, got pneumonia and almost died. A few months later he did die. I notified the Forest Service that we’d been sprayed, but I didn’t know the stuff was bad.”1

  One year later a forest ranger phoned McKusick, who at the time was a professional potter and was fortunate enough to have found a piece of land that included clay deposits, telling him to put pie tins at each corner of his clay deposits to mark the area so it would not be sprayed. But, says McKusick, “they sprayed my clay deposit too.” All of the complaining neighbors were sprayed, including a woman named Billy Shoecraft, who compiled more than a hundred files on chemical poisons before she died of cancer. For three consecutive days the Forest Service sprayed, and, explains McKusick, “We all got bleeding ears; in fact we had bleeding from all body orifices. There’s this disease called IHS—internal hemorrhaging syndrome. In Vietnam 1,300 war dogs got it and the government said it wasn’t because they were spraying with Agent Orange. The dogs got a virus, they said, and had to be destroyed. Well, after the 1969 spraying, we had IHS and I can’t tell you how many horses and cows had it.”

  Animals in the canyon began dying, giving birth to deformed offspring, lying paralyzed on the ground. Some even forgot how to breed. Before the spraying, McKusick recalls, there were no problems, no deformities or miscarriages. But in 1969, “60 to 70 per
cent of our goats were born deformed, and we’ve had heavy deformities ever since.”

  McKusick, who has had a series of heart attacks during the fourteen years since the spraying, adds, “I can’t prove any of this was caused by the spray, but all I can say is that before the spray I was healthy as a horse. The doctor told me I would never have heart trouble. And our family did not have a history of illness…”

  The McKusicks and other families living in the spray zone attempted to find help in their struggle to get the Forest Service to stop the spraying, but to no avail. “We went to everyone we could think of and nobody would help us. We went to Senator Barry Goldwater and he couldn’t be bothered… We asked Governor Jack Williams for help and he laughed. Representative Sam Steiger was the only exception. He tried to help, but he simply didn’t have the weight to stop it…