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Agent Orange And Vietnam Veterans: A Case Study

765 Words4 Pages

These research outcomes have identified a connection between the exposure of Agent Orange and health-related risk to Vietnam Veterans. An interview with a U.S. veteran as reported by Wilcox simply stated (qtd. in Frey 2013): I really didn’t know what they were spraying…Some people thought it was for mosquitos, but I never really gave it much thought. I do remember walking through the defoliated zones. Everything was dead…Did we drink the water? Of course, we did. Where we were, there was nothing else to drink. If we found a bomb crater full of water we just scooped it out and drank it, no matter how brown or scummy it looked. Some of our food was undoubtedly sprayed with Agent Orange. But how were we to know? The army told us the stuff …show more content…

Ford issued Executive Order 11850, renouncing first use of herbicides in war by the United States except for control of vegetation on and around the defensive perimeters of US bases. With this order, President Ford ensured that an operation like Operation Ranch Hand could never happen again. Agent Orange: Veteran Health Issues and Legal Battle Questions regarding Agent Orange arose in the United States after an increasing number of returning Vietnam veterans and their families began to report a range of afflictions, including rashes and other skin irritations, miscarriages, psychological symptoms, Type-2 diabetes, birth defects in children and cancers such as Hodgkin’s disease, prostate cancer and leukemia. In 1979, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 2.4 million veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange during their service in Vietnam. Five years later, in an out-of-court-settlement, seven large chemical companies that manufactured the herbicide agreed to pay $180 million in compensation to the veterans or their next of kin. Various challenges to the …show more content…

Supreme Court confirmed it in 1988. By that time, the settlement had risen to some $240 million including interest. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Agent Orange Act, which mandated that some diseases associated with defoliants (including non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, soft tissue sarcomas and chloracne) be treated as the result of wartime service and helped codify the VA’s response to veterans with conditions related to their exposure to Agent Orange. The Agent Orange Act of 1991 established a presumption of herbicide exposure for veterans who served in Vietnam and who developed one or more of the diseases associated with Agent Orange exposure (Erdtmann

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