TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072390/0723105.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 164 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 27

A Cover-Up on Agent Orange?


Critics charge that the Centers for Disease Control sabotaged
an investigation of the defoliant's effects on Vietnam veterans


    The medical detectives at the Atlanta-based Centers for
Disease Control have a well-earned reputation for relentlessly
tracking down the causes of such mysterious ailments as
Legionnaires' disease. But the agency's record is in danger of
being blemished by a bitter controversy over Agent Orange, a
defoliant containing dioxin, a suspected carcinogen.

    Critics charge that the agency and one of its senior
officials, Dr. Vernon Houk, helped scuttle a $63 million study
that might have determined once and for all whether U.S. troops
exposed to Agent Orange suffered serious damage to their
health. Houk maintains he recommended that the study be
canceled on strictly scientific grounds. Yet there is evidence
that the CDC suppressed reports from the National Academy of
Sciences that directly challenged its position, and spurned
extensive help from the Pentagon, leading the White House to
kill the study.

    Agent Orange was widely used in Vietnam to strip the thick
jungle canopy that helped conceal enemy forces; only later did
scientists become aware of the potentially dangerous long-term
effects of dioxin, which has produced cancers in animals. The
defoliant has been suspect ever since unknown numbers of
Vietnam veterans developed various cancers or fathered
seriously handicapped children. Based on the inability to prove
a conclusive link between those ailments and Agent Orange, the
Reagan and Bush administrations refused to compensate veterans
for all but a few of these health problems. But critics charge
that no clear connections have been established because no
serious large-scale study of exposed veterans has been done.

    The most forceful complaints about the CDC have been leveled
by former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. As the
Navy's top commander in Vietnam, he ordered that Agent Orange
be sprayed in the Mekong Delta region to destroy vegetation
from which the Vietcong regularly launched ambushes against
U.S. patrol boats. In 1988 Zumwalt's son Elmo III, a former
lieutenant who had served in the "brown-water Navy," died from
a rare lymphoma. Zumwalt believes his son's exposure to Agent
Orange was responsible.

    Last month Zumwalt told a House subcommittee that the CDC's
work on Agent Orange had been "a fraud." He singled out Houk
for having "made it his mission to manipulate and prevent the
true facts from being determined." New York Congressman Ted
Weiss, chairman of the panel, charged in an interview that the
CDC appeared to have "rigged" its investigation to support its
view that a large study of exposed veterans was not feasible.

    Congress authorized the CDC study in 1982 after receiving
thousands of complaints from Vietnam vets about Agent Orange.
Houk, director of the agency's Center for Environmental Health
and Injury Control, was placed in charge. At the White House,
a science panel of the Agent Orange Working Group supervised
the CDC's investigation. The Pentagon assigned its
Environmental Support Group to provide the CDC with Agent
Orange spraying records and those of the deployment of soldiers
who may have been exposed.

    But the study soon bogged down in a complex dispute over
identifying which soldiers were likely to have been exposed to
Agent Orange. The CDC considered a company of 200 men
potentially exposed if it passed within 1.3 miles of a recently
sprayed area. The Army had fairly detailed records on the daily
positions of its companies during the fighting. There were
gaps, but the Pentagon group repeatedly told the CDC that other
documents, such as daily journals and situation reports, could
be used to pinpoint which units had ventured into areas sprayed
with the defoliant. Houk's team complained that the Pentagon
data were too spotty to determine whether companies had been
deployed in normal formations spread over 200 to 300 yards or
dispersed over distances of up to 12 miles. It stubbornly
refused to make use of the other records.

    By late January 1986, Dr. Carl Keller, chairman of the White
House science panel, and several other of its members concluded
that Houk had already decided that the CDC study was not
feasible and was trying to pin the blame on the Pentagon. To
break the impasse, retired Army Major General John Murray was
asked by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to review the
Pentagon records. After a four-month study, Murray thought the
records were useful. But as a nonscientist he did not feel
competent to rebut the objections raised by Houk and the White
House scientists. He gave up, agreed that the information was
inadequate and suggested cancellation of the project.

    Unknown to Murray and the White House, the Institute of
Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, then
turned in a contracted consultants' report to the CDC on the
Agent Orange study. It concluded that the Pentagon group was
fully capable of "determining locations and filling gaps" in
the troop movements and criticized the CDC's study for
excluding many of the veterans most likely to have been
exposed. The CDC never turned the institute's report over to the
White House.

    Murray presented his conclusions at a White House meeting
on May 27, 1986. The White House moved to kill the study unless
other ways could be found to identify exposed soldiers. Much
later, Murray learned of the institute's report and began to
doubt his recommendation. "I may have been a babe in the
woods," he said in an interview. "My feeling now is that this
whole thing deserves another look."

    Instead of killing the project outright, the White House
panel accepted a proposal by Houk to take blood tests of 646
Vietnam veterans, selected on the basis of their probable
exposure, to see if they had elevated blood levels of dioxin.
The tests showed that none had abnormal blood levels -- not
surprising, given that the exposure would have taken place 20
years earlier and that none of those tested had handled Agent
Orange directly.

    Though many scientists ridiculed the blood tests, Houk used
them to contend again that the Pentagon records could not be
used to pinpoint exposure to Agent Orange. He recommended
canceling the study; the White House Science Panel agreed, and
the Domestic Policy Council did so in September 1987. This was
after $43 million had been spent.

    Once again the White House had acted without having all the
facts. The Institute of Medicine only weeks earlier had written
a blistering review of the CDC's work. It urged that each of
the agency's major conclusions be deleted because the evidence
presented by the CDC did not support them. The White House
never received this devastating report.

    Houk insists that his opposition to continuing the project
was based solely on rigorous scientific principles. "If we
could find a population of people who were exposed in
sufficient numbers, we would have proceeded with our study,"
he says. "We just simply could not find them." Skeptics like
Congressman Weiss suspect that the CDC did not want to
antagonize the Reagan Administration, which was worried about
the huge liability costs if Agent Orange was shown to cause the
veterans' ailments. Whatever the reasons for its failure, the
decision not to complete the study leaves open a vexing
problem: whether Agent Orange will exact a toll on Vietnam vets
and their descendants for generations to come.


By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Jay Peterzell/Washington.