Vietnam

The Use of Agent Orange in Vietnam War

and its Aftermaths

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May 22 , 2006

The Vietnamese regions and villages once being the most fertile countryside in the world now appear to visitors as barren land without any traces of a jungle that used to stand there . Vietnamese clinics are full of children suffering from inborn mutilations , missing arms and legs . The article The Persisting Poison Agent Orange in Vietnam by

br Korn presents an interview with one of the local doctors , who explained

br that ten years ago there were many more children born with missing limbs . Now , only a few cases appear each year . But , the doctor continued , most of the community 's adults suffer from liver ailments including cancer ' Korn proceeds with the of another clinic , this time it is Southeast Asia 's largest obstetrics hospital The walls of hospital are lined with the wooden shelve with glass jars each of which contains an aborted or stillborn fetus . The lifeless figures in the bottles are all horribly deformed ' Each fetus is a possible victim of dioxin poisoning , the aftermath of defoliants sprayed in South Vietnam by the Americans . The most common birth defect , as observed by the doctors , is anencephaly , the absence of brain . If to rate the abnormalities of children caused by the war , the most frequent is the nervous system deformity followed by the deformity of limbs sensory-organ deformities and cleft palate are also common . Doctors are also confounded by the frequent Siamese twins born in Vietnam each year .The last U .S . troops pulled out of Vietnam in 1975 . The United States has not re-established diplomatic recognition . Everything possible was done to forget what happened in Vietnam , however , American national responsibility still remains . It is a sad fact that wars do not end when the battles stop , at least not in the cases when toxic chemicals are used in the fighting . During the Vietnam War , the United States defoliated an estimated 4 .5 million acres of Vietnamese countryside through the use of Agent Orange . Through chemical warfare the United States created not only medical horrors but they turned Vietnamese territories into a human laboratory where one can observe the effects of dioxin

The Vietnam War was a jungle war to begin with , and conventional means of fighting proved fruitless in the early years . North Vietnamese soldiers infiltrated into southern territory , often maintaining positions near U .S . bases by using the cover of forests . The U .S response was to destroy the jungle by spraying chemicals that would kill the vegetation , and thus the hiding places . Chemical companies in the United States , including Dow , came up with Agent Orange , a mixture of the commercial herbicides 2 ,4-D and 2 ,4 ,5-T , and other similar compounds . Because 2 ,4 ,5-T is manufactured from trichlorophenol , which always contains traces of dioxin , all Agent Orange contained certain amounts of dioxin . Until 1979 these same herbicides were used extensively on American farms and backyard...