Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 02:25:12 -0700

Air Force Agent Orange study draws flak

March 15, 2000

Web posted at: 5:23 PM EST (2223 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. Air Force has been too slow and too secretive in studying whether the herbicide Agent Orange sickened Vietnam veterans, failing to get them timely compensation, critics told a congressional committee Wednesday.

But the senior investigator of the military's study, Joe Michalck, called it "one of the best epidemiological studies ever conducted."

Since it inception in 1981, controversy has surrounded the Ranch Hand study, an estimated $140 million project to determine whether exposure to defoliants in Vietnam caused the health problems of veterans who served there.

Controversy surfaced again Wednesday as a House Government Reform Committee panel reviewed a separate report by the General Accounting Office which said that veterans needing health compensation have benefitted little from the study named after the herbicide spraying operation in Vietnam.

"The Ranch Hand study has had limited impact on decisions affecting veterans' compensation," Kwai-Cheung Chan of the GAO, Congress' investigative arm, said in prepared testimony.

Chan said the GAO report found the Air Force has only made a small portion of its findings available to scientists and veterans, though it was mandated to release information periodically over the course of the 25-year study. In one instance, officials delayed for eight years, until 1992, to publish findings related to birth defects -- information that might have helped veterans decide whether to have children or how to handle prenatal care.

Chan noted that congressional critics and news reports have previously touched on some of the study's problems, adding that some have been corrected while others persist.

The Ranch Hand study will follow until 2006 the health of 1300 Air Force personnel who sprayed Agent Orange in Vietnam. The purpose of the nine-year Agent Orange operation, which ended in 1970, was to defoliate swaths of Vietnam's jungles and deprive North Vietnamese troops of cover.

The study contrasts the health of U.S. troops involved in the spraying to a group not involved but matched by age, race and military occupation.

An estimated 3.4 million U.S. men and women served in Vietnam.

Critics have long complained the size of the study group is too small, that it should have been done by an independent group instead of the Air Force, and that its methodology is flawed. Critics also contend it has mislead the public about what the study can and can't determine.

"The failure to communicate an honest scientific appraisal of its own work is, in part, responsible for the fact that Vietnam veterans are being compensated for so few diseases they or their offspring may have developed as a result of their exposure to herbicides during the Vietnam War," John F. Sommer, Jr., executive director of the American Legion, said in a statement prepared for the hearing.

The Department of Veterans' Affairs says it provides compensation for 8,000 veterans with some dozen diseases believed associated with Agent Orange, including chloracne skin disorder, some nerve disorders and several types of cancer in addition to providing benefits for children with the birth defect spina bifida.

"Believe me, we will leave no stone unturned to find any connection between exposure to Agent Orange and adverse health effects," Michalck testified.

He said the study has made "every effort" to adhere to rules set out for it, collect complete and accurate data, and get unbiased interpretations of the data.

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