re: #228 Decatur Deb

Bullshitters. It was the dioxin contamination that put most of the long-term threat into Agent Orange.

By the mid-Sixties, resolutions were filed at the United Nations condemning the United States, arguing the USA was violating the 1925 Geneva Accords over the use of chemical agents.

The USA defeated such resolutions, arguing the agent was an herbicide and people were not being targeted with it anyway.

By the mid-Nineties, while the Veterans Administration had received tens of thousands of claims for injury due to Agent Orange, they’d only approved a handful.

The Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) was only directed to study potential health risks of Agent Orange exposure in the Nineties; the last update was in 2014. They ruled that any link between Agent Orange and various maladies is confounded by chance, bias, time, and confounding factors.

In 1984, a class-action lawsuit was brought against Dow Chemical, which denied any association between Agent Orange and veteran illness. However, they settled out-of-court for $180 million just before jury selection was to begin if the veterans would drop all future claims against the company.