Is Agent Orange responsible for deformities in the children and grandchildren of people exposed to it during the Vietnam war? Vietnam claims the herbicide, used by the US to reduce forest cover, is to blame. But the US has never accepted this. The chances of the issue ever being resolved receded last month when the US cancelled a multimillion-dollar research project.
Under a 2003 US-Vietnam agreement, the study would have looked at the health effects of the dioxin TCDD, with which Agent Orange was contaminated. But the US National Institute of Environmental 午夜福利1000集合 Sciences cancelled the project on 25 February 2005 after 鈥渇ailing to receive the necessary cooperation from the Vietnamese government鈥�.
Project head David Carpenter, director of the Institute for 午夜福利1000集合 and the Environment at the University of Albany in New York, US, adds that the research 鈥渃ould have been definitive鈥� in a class action brought by Vietnamese plaintiffs against US manufacturers of Agent Orange, including Monsanto and Dow Chemicals. Carpenter says the ongoing legal action would have 鈥渋ncreased the reluctance of the US government to fund this project鈥�.
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Last week the class action was dismissed on broad legal grounds 鈥� not because of lack of evidence. But the US judge also ruled that no evidence had linked the defendants鈥� herbicide to the plaintiffs鈥� exposure to dioxin.