Word: agent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Agent Orange's victims step up demands for compensation...
...they gathered to hear a report on what may be the biggest product-liability case ever filed, and surely one of the most unusual. With some 3,000 other Viet Nam veterans across the country, they are plaintiffs in a suit against five companies that made a defoliant called Agent Orange, which the veterans believe is the cause of their maladies...
...Force sprayed Agent Orange heavily over Viet Nam to lay bare thousands of acres of jungle in which Viet Cong guerrillas were thought to be hiding. An Army handout for one such mission, Operation Ranch Hand in 1966, assured the troops that "the sprayed chemical is nontoxic to human or animal life." But Agent Orange was contaminated by a byproduct of the manufacturing process, dioxin, which is perhaps the most toxic synthetic chemical known. When a few pounds of it were released into the air by an explosion at an Italian chemical plant in 1976, more than 700 people...
Veterans, and their children who were conceived after the war, began displaying symptoms identical to those known to be caused by dioxin poisoning shortly after the servicemen returned to the U.S., but they and their doctors long failed to connect their illnesses to Agent Orange. After reading about the Seveso incident, however, Paul Reutershan, a veteran who was suffering from cancer of the colon, filed suit in 1977. He died the next year, at age 28, but by then Victor Yannacone Jr., the lawyer who had brought the 1966 suit that helped ban DDT, had taken up his case...
Yannacone contends that the companies knew that Agent Orange was highly dangerous, but failed to warn either the Pentagon or servicemen who might come in contact with it. He is asking the federal district court in Westbury, Long Island, to order the companies to pay a percentage of their future profits-the amount to be determined by the court -into a trust fund for the compensation and care of all Viet Nam G.I.s and their children injured by dioxin. The sum at stake could easily run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions, as Agent Orange Victims...