SHAKEDOWN STREET:

Ending the Agent Orange Myth (Michael Fumento, 3/05/04, Outlook)

Agent Orange is every bit as bad as environmentalists, anti-war activists and veterans victim groups have always claimed.

Or so sayeth the media, with headlines like "Study Finds Sharply Increased Risk of Cancer among Dioxin-Exposed Vietnam Veterans" (Agence-Presse France) and "Study: Agent Orange Linked to Cancer Risk" (Associated Press Online).

These and myriad similar stories are based on a study of veterans of Operation Ranch Hand published in the February Journal of Occupational Medicine. Ranch Handers were the ones who sprayed the Agent Orange herbicide and thus are the only group of vets known to have exposure to it and its infamous trace ingredient, dioxin. They've been tracked for twenty-two years and an evaluation is published every three.

This time researchers found over twice as many cases of malignant melanoma (an often-fatal skin cancer) as among the national population, with about 50 percent more prostate cancers.

Both findings were statistically significant, meaning there was only a 5 percent probability they occurred just by chance. That sounds pretty convincing, unless you bothered to actually read the study.

You'd first notice that a control group of vets in the evaluation that never sprayed herbicides in Vietnam had similarly high prostate-cancer levels. That leaves only the high melanoma rate as unique to the Ranch Handers.

Further, for all cancers combined there was no significant excesses of disease or death for Ranch Handers compared either to the general population or the control vets. Indeed, they had only about half the stomach-cancer rate compared to both groups.

If you believe Agent Orange or dioxin caused the excess prostate and skin cancers, you must also accept that it prevented stomach tumors. But nobody will say that; certainly nobody in the media mentioned the stomach cancers.

All you really need to know about John Kerry is that when he talks about how he's been a fighter for veterans he points at the Agent Orange and Gulf WAr Syndrome boondoggles with pride.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 8, 2004 8:28 PM