America's toxic legacy uncovered

Canadian researchers in Vietnam have found high dioxin levels from Agent Orange

Don Cayo, Vancouver Sun
Published: Monday, April 30, 2007

Today, 32 years to the day after U.S. forces fled Saigon and left Vietnam to the Viet Cong, a West Vancouver company has released a report that documents the toxic legacy they also left behind.

It's a lethal chemical that's still found, in at least a handful of sites in Vietnam, in amounts hundreds of times greater than North American and European scientists believe is safe.

The findings of Hatfield Consultants Ltd., a company that specializes in environmental monitoring, confirms several things that Vietnamese scientists have been saying for years:

- That "the Chemical War" -- the Americans' widespread spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides to kill the jungle where Viet Cong soldiers used to hide -- left soil pockets poisoned by a deadly form of dioxin, which contributes to a host of ills like cancer and various birth defects.

- That the contamination lasts a long, long time in certain "hot spots" -- places that received extra-heavy doses of the spray.

- That this dioxin works its way up the food chain to accumulate in the bodies of people who live or work too near high concentrations of the poison.

A detailed sampling at the Da Nang airport in Central Vietnam -- a former staging area for U.S. Agent Orange spray missions -- and a battery of expensive laboratory tests found not only this smoking gun, but also the fingerprints on it, says Grant Bruce, vice president of Hatfield.
"It's a slam dunk," Bruce said. "The dioxin is there. And it's not from industry, it's not from burning garbage, or from anything else that people have tried to blame.

"We've proven beyond a doubt that this dioxin contamination is from Agent Orange, and the Americans are responsible."

They've also proven that there's a mind-boggling amount of it, probably not widespread, but confirmed in at least a handful of concentrated hot spots.

The fingerprint that identifies the poison as coming from Agent Orange, not some other pollutant, is found in the very nature of dioxin, says Hatfield president Tom Boivin. Dioxin isn't a single chemical, but rather a family of more than 70 related ones, and the variant found in the Da Nang samples is not only one of the deadliest but also the one associated only with Agent Orange.

In developed countries, the standards for allowable levels of dioxin are all over the map, ranging from a high of 1,000 parts per trillion in many countries to a low of just 2 ppt in Finland. But in the land around the end of Da Nang's main runway -- the area where spray planes were loaded, and then washed out after their runs -- Hatfield researchers found 365,000 parts per trillion.
In the sediment of small lakes around the end of the runway, they found levels of 5,000 ppt, 50 times the normal allowable limit for sediment. And they found 3,000 ppt in fish -- 100 times what most countries tolerate.

They won't say what they found in the blood samples they tested of 50-plus people who live and work in the contaminated area -- some of them fishing in the ponds or raising fish in adjacent dugouts -- because the people themselves haven't been informed yet. But it is clear that the levels were very, very high.

The Hatfield researchers didn't look beyond the blood samples to document the human misery that dioxin poisoning can cause, but Vietnamese epidemiologists have been doing detailed studies for decades. In comparing the rates of birth defects in sprayed areas -- most of which appear to be clean now, but which were contaminated in the past -- with unsprayed areas, they have found:

- The risk of cleft palate, some cases so severe that much of the face is missing, is 3.4 times higher.

- The risk of cataracts is 6.3 times higher.

- Pelvic hernias, some cases so severe that most of the innards slide into the genital areas, are 7.9 times higher.

- Skin disorders, many horribly disfiguring and some linked to retardation or much increased susceptibility to cancer, are 4.4 times higher.

The good news, Boivin said, is that it seems clear the dangerously high levels of contamination are confined to small geographic areas. About 10 per cent of Vietnam was sprayed during the war, but the dioxin levels appear to have reverted to normal in all but a handful of small, heavily exposed sites.

The Da Nang test is the latest -- as well as the most detailed and dramatic -- of a series that Hatfield has been doing in Vietnam over several years.

The involvement began in 1994 when the company's founding president, Chris Hatfield, went to Vietnam to seek out business opportunities.

As he told me when I wrote a lengthy profile of the work the company was doing back in 2000, he quickly learned two things. One is that the dioxin problem, which was then suspected but not proven, was urgent and important. The other is that no one was going to pay his company to do the work.

Yet since then, the company has remained consistently involved. It has relied on a series of grants, first from CIDA and more recently from the Ford Foundation, to pay most of the hard costs such as the stiff lab fees for testing samples. But Hatfield, Boivin, Bruce and several of their associates have volunteered their time and have made countless trips back and forth.
The researchers chose the Da Nang site as one of the three likely worst hot spots, winnowed down from their initial list of almost 3,000 locations where Agent Orange was known to have been used or stored.

For the Hatfield scientists, their job often involves political skills almost as much as engineering and scientific expertise.

Chris Hatfield spent many hours dealing with the initial hesitancy of the Vietnamese government, which had never dealt with a private company as a partner before, and it took him years to get the initial approval to do the first testing in a remote part of the country.
And even now there are political sensitivities with both the Vietnamese government, which is concerned about its international reputation as an agricultural producer, and the American government, which is only now beginning to look at what Bruce and Boivin believe is their obligation to get involved in cleaning up the mess.

The current report makes the case for two levels of response:
The first, mitigation, could quickly and cheaply limit the damage by protecting people from further exposure. This involves things as simple as building a good fence, launching public education programs to make people who live nearby aware of the dangers, and providing economic alternatives for those who make their livings from contaminated land.

Remediation -- i.e. removing the contamination and measures such as paving over the sites -- could be a great deal more expensive, Boivin said, and that's probably one reason why the U.S. has been reluctant to put up its hand to get involved.

But the mitigation measures can and should go ahead without delay, he said -- with or without U.S. involvement if it can't be obtained in a timely way.

dcayo@png.canwest.com