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Journalism of Courage
April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. On that day in 1975, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops entered what was then called Saigon and declared victory.
However, even after all these years, millions of Vietnamese people continue to feel the lingering effects of Agent Orange, a toxic chemical that the United States used during the war.
Estimates suggest that currently, there are 3 million people, including many children, in Vietnam who are still suffering from serious health issues associated with exposure to Agent Orange.
Agent Orange was a blend of herbicides that US forces sprayed over Vietnam to defoliate trees and shrubs, and kill food crops that provided cover and food to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. The chemical comprised a 50-50 mixture of two herbicides — 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T — and a toxic contaminant, known as dioxin.
Although Agent Orange remained toxic for only days or weeks and then degraded, dioxin could survive up to three years in soil that was exposed to sunlight. If buried or leached under the surface or deep in the sediment of rivers and other water bodies, it could have a half-life (time required for any substance to decrease by half) of more than 100 years — more than enough time to be consumed by fish, ducks, and other animals that people eat. People could also be exposed to dioxin through inhaling contaminated dust, and absorbing it through skin. Dioxin has a half-life of up to 20 years in the human body.
Between 1961 and 1971, the US sprayed around 74 million litres of chemicals over South Vietnam, and border areas of Laos and Cambodia. More than half of this was Agent Orange.
The concentrations were some 20 times the concentration the manufacturers recommended for killing plants, according to a report by The Aspen Institute, a US-based non-profit organisation.
During these years, some 4.8 million Vietnamese people and nearly 2.8 million US soldiers were exposed to Agent Orange. Out of these, three million Vietnamese suffered illnesses because of the chemical, one estimate by Vietnam said.
The US stopped using the chemical in 1971 amid mounting international condemnation and safety concerns. This happened as by the late 1960s, several studies had shown that dioxin could cause abnormalities and stillbirths in mice, and reports of human birth defects in sprayed areas of Vietnam had started to emerge.
However, relatively high concentrations of dioxin continued to linger in some of Vietnam’s soils and aquatic sediments, especially near former US air bases that had handled vast volumes of the chemicals, in the years after the war ended.
The severe impact of Agent Orange has been suffered by not only those who were exposed to it during the war, but also the future generations. Over the years, Vietnam has asserted that “those harmed by Agent Orange included the second-, third-, and even fourth-generation relatives of those who experienced the spraying, because of dioxin lingering in the environment or inherited health effects,” according to a report in the journal Science.
Apart from cancer and diabetes, one of the most prominent health issues among Vietnamese people has been birth defects such as spina bifida (when a baby’s spine and spinal cord do not develop properly), oral clefts, cardiovascular defects, hip dislocations and hypospadias (where the opening of the urethra is not at the tip of the penis). In the early 2000s, the Red Cross of Vietnam estimated that at least 150,000 Vietnamese children were born with serious birth defects.
However, there have been only a handful of studies that have shed light on the link between birth defects and exposure to Agent Orange. That is because the US until the mid-2000s largely ignored the impact of the toxin in Vietnam, despite the fact that in 1991, the former accepted that certain diseases could be related to exposure to Agent Orange and made US veterans who had them eligible for benefits.
David Carpenter, a public health physician at the University at Albany (New York), told the journal Science that one reason for the lack of US support in Vietnam was that the issue “is extremely political” in both countries. He said that if studies had proved a link between birth defects and exposure to dioxin, the US might have been “expected to pay reparations to Vietnamese children.” Alternatively, if they had found no link, that might have “embarrassed” the Vietnamese government.
The use of Agent Orange also caused wide-scale damage to the environment in Vietnam. A 1983 report, also published by the journal Science, revealed that many sprayed upland forests that villagers tried to convert to agriculture were “unsuitable for growing crops and the land has become covered with a coarse, deep-rooting grass.”
Notably, since then there have not been many studies on how forests and wildlife have recovered from the spraying of Agent Orange.
In 2006, the US finally got together with Vietnam and began to clean up Agent Orange from the environment. But as the process of clean up is long and very expensive, there are large sites in Vietnam where the work is far from over. For instance, in Da Nang, where an air base was contaminated during storage and transportation of Agent Orange, an area the size of 10 soccer fields remains heavily contaminated, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Moreover, after the return of President Donald Trump to the White House, major clean-up projects in Vietnam have been halted due to cuts in the United States Agency For International Development (USAID).
Nguyen Van An, the chairman of the Association for Victims of Agent Orange in Danang, told the AP that Vietnam could not handle the toxic chemicals that still persist without help. “We always believe that the US government and the manufacturers of this toxic chemical must have the responsibility to support the victims,” he said.
