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...study soon bogged down in a complex dispute over identifying which soldiers were likely to have been exposed to Agent Orange. The CDC considered a company of 200 men potentially exposed if it passed within 1.3 miles of a recently sprayed area. The Army had fairly detailed records on the daily positions of its companies during the fighting. There were gaps, but the Pentagon group repeatedly told the CDC that other documents, such as daily journals and situation reports, could be used to pinpoint which units had ventured into areas sprayed with the defoliant. Houk's team complained that...
...late January 1986, Dr. Carl Keller, chairman of the White House science panel, and several other of its members concluded that Houk had already decided that the CDC study was not feasible and was trying to pin the blame on the Pentagon. To break the impasse, retired Army Major General John Murray was asked by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to review the Pentagon records. After a four-month study, Murray thought the records were useful. But as a nonscientist he did not feel competent to rebut the objections raised by Houk and the White House scientists. He gave up, agreed...
Unknown to Murray and the White House, the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, then turned in a contracted consultants' report to the CDC on the Agent Orange study. It concluded that the Pentagon group was fully capable of "determining locations and filling gaps" in the troop movements and criticized the CDC's study for excluding many of the veterans most likely to have been exposed. The CDC never turned the institute's report over to the White House...
Once again the White House had acted without having all the facts. The Institute of Medicine only weeks earlier had written a blistering review of the CDC's work. It urged that each of the agency's major conclusions be deleted because the evidence presented by the CDC did not support them. The White House never received this devastating report...
...opposition to continuing the project was based solely on rigorous scientific principles. "If we could find a population of people who were exposed in sufficient numbers, we would have proceeded with our study," he says. "We just simply could not find them." Skeptics like Congressman Weiss suspect that the CDC did not want to antagonize the Reagan Administration, which was worried about the huge liability costs if Agent Orange was shown to cause the veterans' ailments. Whatever the reasons for its failure, the decision not to complete the study leaves open a vexing problem: whether Agent Orange will exact...