Word: dioxins
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...dollar lawsuit by some 20,000 Viet Nam veterans and their relatives against Dow Chemical and four other companies that manufactured Agent Orange. One of the substances present in the herbicide, used in the Viet Nam War to defoliate enemy crops and jungle hiding places, is the dangerous chemical dioxin. The documents reveal that Dow officials had knowledge even before the mid-1960s that exposure to dioxin might cause people to become seriously ill. Even so, the company continued to sell herbicides containing dioxin...
...confidential letter written in 1965, during a time when the Government was purchasing millions of pounds of Agent Orange, Dow's toxicology director wrote to another Dow official that dioxin "is exceptionally toxic; it has tremendous potential for producing chloracne [an ugly skin disease] and systemic injury. . . I trust that you will be very judicious in your use of this information. It could be quite embarrassing if it were misinterpreted or misused." A postscript added, "Under no circumstances may this letter be reproduced, shown or sent to anyone outside...
Following a 1964 dioxin spill and outbreak of chloracne at Dow's Midland, Mich., plant and complaints from consumers, Dow met with other chemical companies to discuss "problems of health" associated with dioxin. Dow says that the get-together was an attempt to police the industry from within and coordinate methods to keep the level of dioxin in Agent Orange below the danger point. In 1970 Dow recommended to then Defense Secretary Melvin Laird that the Government set a safer maximum level of dioxin content in Agent Orange...
...maintains that even before this warning, top U.S. officials already knew the hazards of dioxin in Agent Orange from the Government's own research and that as a Government contractor, the company was simply filling an order. The federal court documents show that in 1967 the Joint Chiefs of Staff reviewed a Rand Corp. warning about the herbicide but discounted it and continued the spraying, believed by the military to be essential to the war effort, for an additional 2½ years. Yet the Pentagon is on record as having ordered Agent Orange from Dow and others specifically...
...hearings, is not expected to go before a jury until next year. "It's been all cloak and dagger," says ex-Navyman Sutton, "but I think the truth is finally coming out." No doubt, but some truths may continue to prove elusive: while scientific studies have shown that dioxin is fatal to laboratory animals even in minute quantities, its effects on humans are still a matter of considerable debate among experts...