Word: cdc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Vernon Houk, helped scuttle a $63 million study that might have determined once and for all whether U.S. troops exposed to Agent Orange suffered serious damage to their health. Houk maintains he recommended that the study be canceled on strictly scientific grounds. Yet there is evidence that the CDC suppressed reports from the National Academy of Sciences that directly challenged its position, and spurned extensive help from the Pentagon, leading the White House to kill the study...
...most forceful complaints about the CDC have been leveled by former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. As the Navy's top commander in Vietnam, he ordered that Agent Orange be sprayed in the Mekong Delta region to destroy vegetation from which the Vietcong regularly launched ambushes against U.S. patrol boats. In 1988 Zumwalt's son Elmo III, a former lieutenant who had served in the "brown-water Navy," died from a rare lymphoma. Zumwalt believes his son's exposure to Agent Orange was responsible...
Last month Zumwalt told a House subcommittee that the CDC's work on Agent Orange had been "a fraud." He singled out Houk for having "made it his mission to manipulate and prevent the true facts from being determined." New York Congressman Ted Weiss, chairman of the panel, charged in an interview that the CDC appeared to have "rigged" its investigation to support its view that a large study of exposed veterans was not feasible...
Congress authorized the CDC study in 1982 after receiving thousands of complaints from Vietnam vets about Agent Orange. Houk, director of the agency's Center for Environmental Health and Injury Control, was placed in charge. At the White House, a science panel of the Agent Orange Working Group supervised the CDC's investigation. The Pentagon assigned its Environmental Support Group to provide the CDC with Agent Orange spraying records and those of the deployment of soldiers who may have been exposed...
...With the CDC on the case, a better understanding of the illness may not be too far away. In the meantime, CFS sufferers are getting impatient. "The surveillance program is better than nothing," says 37-year-old Barry Sleight, a CFS patient and lobbyist in Bethesda, Md., "but it needs to be expanded. My God, this is an epidemic...