Agent Orange caused a form of Acne for people with extreme exposures. Called Chlor Acne.
Nothing else, and it doesn’t cause cancer.
Irresponsible people from plastic surgery at MD Anderson, usually reliable and careful, publish another BS Agent Orange study claiming to find a higher rate of non melanoma skin cancers in Agent Orange exposed people.
Imagine the confounders that might be in play in this study.
They are looking at skin cancers in ex military–for starters.
Non melanoma invasive skin cancer is invasive and it grows and it is a product of aging and sun exposure.
It’s not really an invasive like a cancer–doesn’t metastsize or kill.
From the study:
The researchers analyzed medical records of 100 consecutive men who enrolled in the Agent Orange registry at the Veterans Affairs Hospital of Washington, DC, between August 2009 and January 2010. Exposure to TCDD consisted of living or working in contaminated areas for 56 percent of veterans, actively spraying Agent Orange in 30 percent, and traveling in contaminated areas for 14 percent. The study was limited to men with lighter skin types.
The authors admit the limits of their study and the uncertainties but suggest more studies:
Nevertheless, the results strengthen the previously reported association between TCDD exposure and the development of NMISC, even many years after exposure. Certain groups appear to be at particularly high risk, including veterans actively involved in spraying Agent Orange, those with chloracne, and those with lighter skin types. Dr. Clemens and coauthors write, “Further studies are warranted to determine the relative risk within this patient population and to determine appropriate management strategies so that veterans may receive the care they earned in service.”
These researchers better hurry, the Viet Nam vets range in age from 62, born in 1952, to dead.
Smell a rat–you ought to. Light skinned people have a higher rate of squamous and basal cell skin cancers, which are locally invasive but don’t metastasize. Ex military are usually more likely to have more sun exposure, and the resaerchers don’t have a control group. This is a typical observational epidemiological study with no controls and not much to say.
You might also note that except for general statements we have no evidence of the rate of non melanoma invasive skin cancers, so this is not even an observational study with a control group–this is a series of anecdotes, but its about that bad old relic from the Viet Nam War–Agent Orange. That’s worth a grant and some print, right?
This is an uncontrolled anecdotal observational desk top retrospective medical record review? And the exposures are self reported?
Please–this is crap. MD Anderson should be ashamed. The Agent Orange thing is like the Gulf War Syndrome thing–anti war agitators funded and supported by subversives, including commie funded groups, turning soldiers into victims of the evil American War Machine and the Imperialist Capitalist Hegemon. Evil Agent Orange–Cancer Monster created by evil capitalism.
The studies of the guys who sprayed Agent Orange, the guys in Operation Ranch Hand, showed they were healthier, had less cancer than a comparable group.
http://www.sciencecodex.com/agent_orange_linked_to_skin_cancer_risk_reports_plastic_and_reconstructive_surgery-126911
The studies of Gulf War Syndrome have a similar taint of junk science.
The major researcher Dr. Robert Haley, a public health officer from Dallas, cobbled together a bunch of self reported neurotics into a “Syndrome” that got published in JAMA in three separate article. Haley identified a plethora of symptoms he just glued together as something caused by an unknown agent in Kuwait/Iraq.
Then he would go around and make his case. One of his great shows was to poison chickens and say–well that’s the kind of thing that can happen when living things are exposed to toxins and poisons.
Still Haley had to go with “syndrome” because he couldn’t meet Koch’s postulates or the Bradford Hill rules on toxicology.
Syndrom means no disease has been identified according to the rules of medicine and pathology, just a set of symptoms identified and put together by the originator of the idea.
Hysterical epidemics are another form of such a thing–suggestibility and stress and a search for secondary gain are often complicating factors in syndromes.
Usually in a syndrome people claim a set of symptoms that are so nonspecific and common as to not allow a diagnosis and share commonality with all kinds of other human distress signs–insomnia, anxiety, dizziness, inattention, hyperactivity, loss of energy and hypoactivity–get it? But there is also malingering particularly if there is a disability payment waiting. Politics is important sometimes, particularly in things related to public servie–fire/police/military. No one wants to question benefits or payments for someone who served.
Robert Haley got some traction because Ross Perot hated the Bushes and wanted to make something of Gulf War Syndrome.
In addition many soldiers complained because they had been primed by the panic about chemical warfare in the run up to the war–and training in full chem outfits does tend to freak people out.
We made those Chem outfits right in my home town and there was plenty of fear about Saddam letting loose his killer chemicals and bio agents.
Ross Perot funded Haley’s research after Haley reported he had a group of soldiers who claimed all kinds of problems after returning from Kuwait.
The anti war Editor of JAMA wanted to publish something to prove war–what’s it good for. The perfect storm.
Remember George Lundberg, MD who is now editor of a medical web site, MedScape? George got fired long after the Gulf War articles later for dredging up a silly paper about kids saying oral sex wasn’t sex, supposedly to defuse the Lewinsky/Clinton Oval Office scandal. However I was constantly irritated with Lundberg for editoral decision making. He was a flaming lefty.
George was notoriously junky as editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association well before he tried to get Clinton out of jam.
“For the soldiers” is just one notch below “for the children” when it comes to removing political opposition. Agent Orange found more traction because it had a clear cut target in the people that sprayed the defoliant, that is to say, us. Gulf War Syndrome couldn’t be used as an effective rallying cry because delving into the subject might reveal Saddam Hussein’s long history of using weapons of mass destruction in the form of chemical weapons. The narrative that there never were weapons of mass destruction was more useful so GWS was dropped by the media.
The EPA and various state environmental agencies regularly use similar chemicals to control “invasive” species.
But since they are doing it to kill bad plants (meaning ones they don’t like), it is okay to expose people and animals.
A good possibility is that many of these health issues came about as a result of those friendly environmentally-caring folks in the government.
I get excess stomach acid when I am forced to listen to Democrats bloviate.
Can we please outlaw that?
Agent Orange was a 50:50 mixture of two commercially available herbicides, 2,3-D and 2,4,5-T. The later could contain some amounts of tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD) which has been called a carcinogen. If I recall correctly, the EPA got into the dioxin scare based on toxicity data showing that a tetrachloro dioxins were extremely toxic to guinea pigs, but not particularly toxic to rats or monkeys.
Soldiers were very likely exposed to AO spraying. However, it is very likely that agricultural workers were also exposed to the components and had high exposures to the sun. Soldiers were an easier group to track, but I don’t recall hearing much about agricultural workers.