Word: agent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That still leaves some 33,000 Agent Orange claimants who will get nothing, at least for now. They continue to maintain that the chemical is responsible for a jump in cancer among veterans and an increase in birth defects in their children. Julio Gonzales, 42, who served in Viet Nam for six months in 1969, feels sure that the series of disorders he has suffered since 1971, which include cancer of the bladder and problems with his kidneys and liver, was caused by Agent Orange. "The CDC can't see the forest for the trees," he says...
...Hoffman, coordinator of the CDC study, admits that scientists have not ruled out the possibility that those directly involved in handling and spraying Agent Orange were hurt by the herbicide. But he thinks that his agency's research clearly shows that most soldiers were not at risk. In response, veterans' groups have denounced the CDC study as poorly designed and irrelevant. "The CDC is a commendable research institution," says American Legion spokesman John Hanson, "but with this study, they dropped the ball...
There are legitimate questions about the CDC's methods. The best way to study the effects of Agent Orange would have been to single out those soldiers most exposed to the herbicide and compare their cancer rates with those in the ) unexposed population. But when the investigators tried to do this, says Dr. Hoffman, they could not reliably identify the soldiers who had received the highest doses. So instead the researchers adopted a more indirect approach, examining the incidence of six different cancers, including soft-tissue sarcoma and a kind of liver malignancy, that had been tentatively linked to herbicide...
...body of a high school girl, wrapped in plastic, washes up on the lakeshore near a small town in the Pacific Northwest. An FBI agent teams up with the local sheriff to investigate. The victim, they discover, has been leading a secret life. So, it seems, is nearly everyone else in town...
Then there are the Lynchian touches of off-kilter characters and sideshow weirdness. A woman with an eyepatch has an obsession with drapes. Visitors to a bank vault find a stuffed deer head lying on the table. "It fell down," notes a bank officer blandly. The boyish FBI agent (Kyle MacLachlan) dictates every detail of his day into a cassette recorder and gets misty-eyed over Douglas firs and snowshoe rabbits. "Know why I'm whittling?" he says to the sheriff at one point. "Because that's what you do in a town where a yellow light still means slow...