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AGENT ORANGE: "WE WERE TOLD IT WOULDN'T HURT
US." -- Those who were poisoned by Agent Orange
at
Base Gagetown may finally get paid.
For more about Agent Orange, use the VA
Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/
sessearch.php?q=agent
+orange&op=ph
For more about Agent Orange at Base Gagetown,
use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/ses
search.php?q=gagetown&op=and
Story here...
http://www.macleans.ca/
science/health/article.jsp?content=
20070903_109070_109070
Story below:
-------------------------
Orange Alert: 'We were told it wouldn't hurt
us'
Those who were poisoned by Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown may finally get
paid
KATE LUNAU
John Chisholm remembers when Agent Orange came to Gagetown in New
Brunswick in 1966. Stationed on the military base as a member of the
artillery unit, the young soldier was assigned with a handful of others
to help spray the chemical defoliant. Some days Chisholm would mix it;
others he'd stand out in the field, hoisting a giant flag to mark where
helicopters should drop their load. "It would sting to the high
heavens," recalls Chisholm, now 69, who was repeatedly doused in the
herbicide. "But I'll tell you one thing we did notice right off the bat:
there were no more mosquitoes out there. It'd kill them in no time."
Agent Orange -- famously used by the U.S. military to clear swaths of
the Vietnamese jungle from 1962 to 1971 -- was sprayed over a small area
of CFB Gagetown for three days in 1966 and four days in 1967 as part of
a U.S. military test project. Agent Purple, its lesser-known cousin, was
also sprayed, as was Agent White -- together, the so-called "rainbow
drugs," as Chisholm knows them. "We were told it wouldn't hurt us," he
says, recalling one fellow soldier eating a boxed lunch off a barrel of
Agent Orange, and others even spraying one another with it to cool off.
Agent Orange exposure has since been associated with an array of medical
conditions, from leukemia to diabetes to prostate cancer, according to
the U.S. Institute of Medicine (the IOM is recognized by the Canadian
government as the leading scientific authority on the herbicide).
Chisholm now has prostate cancer. He hasn't received a cent in
compensation from the Canadian government, money he feels he deserves.
Now, after years of delay, a compensation package could be on the
horizon. Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson recently told Maclean's
to expect an announcement "before summer passes." Veterans, civilians
and communities around the base are all being looked at, Thompson said.
"We've tried to come up with a package that is fair to all those
considerations," he explained.
While it's not yet clear who would be eligible for compensation,
thousands of Canadians who have worked or lived on or near CFB Gagetown
feel they're owed it -- and say the problem extends well past the test
use of Agent Orange. Many claim they've been harmed by other herbicides
sprayed on areas of the base almost annually since 1956 to remove cover
and reduce the risk of forest fires during soldiers' exercises. "In our
community, anecdotally, there seems to be an awful lot of cancer," says
Jody Carr, MLA for Oromocto-Gagetown.
In the early years of the spray program, "the contaminants of the annual
spray were one and the same as the contaminants of Agents Orange, White
and Purple," says former New Brunswick health minister Dennis Furlong,
who's led an inquiry into the use of herbicides on the base, adding that
the contaminants were spread unknowingly at the time, according to his
research. While Ottawa insists herbicide spraying on the base has been
tightly controlled, defoliants did drift on the wind to nearby Upper
Gagetown and Sheffield in 1964, wiping out some farmers' crops.
"Tomatoes just crack," farmer's daughter Gwen Harvey, 15, told the Aug.
8, 1964, edition of the local Daily Gleaner newspaper. The government
paid out about $250,000 in reparations and modified its spray program to
reduce drift as a result.
Ottawa's sluggish response to calls for Agent Orange compensation stands
in stark contrast to the U.S. and New Zealand. In the U.S., Vietnam
veterans are paid automatically if they develop a medical condition
associated with Agent Orange exposure. New Zealand last year announced a
$22-million compensation package that includes ex gratia payments of
$30,000 to its Vietnam vets suffering from certain conditions. The
package also included a formal apology. Britain has even compensated a
British soldier exposed to Agent Orange at Gagetown: Keith Pilmoor, who
was stationed at the base in 1966 and said he was sick for decades
after, was awarded a special pension earlier this year.
Ottawa, meanwhile, didn't publicly acknowledge that veterans had been
harmed by the use of Agent Orange at Gagetown until 2005. That was the
year Gloria Sellar broke the news that her husband had received a
medical disability pension for exposure, widely believed to be the first
pension of its kind. Retired Brig.-Gen. Gordon Sellar, who commanded the
Black Watch regiment at Gagetown and was later diagnosed with leukemia,
died on Oct. 1, 2004, only months after the pension was awarded. "We all
knew something terrible was happening, but no one was talking about it,"
Sellar says. She's been a strong advocate for victims ever since.
When Chisholm learned that Sellar had received
a pension, he was angry. "I said, 'What the hell's going on?' They may
have slept in it; they may have been sprayed. But they were never in it
like I was." Chisholm has applied for a disability pension from Veterans
Affairs four times, and four times he's been turned down for lack of
documentation. "You can't get [documentation]. There is none," he says.
While DVA says it can't discuss specific cases, disability pension
applications must be "evidence-based," says spokesperson Janice Summerby.
Applicants must prove they were exposed to the herbicides, and have a
medical condition the IOM associates with exposure. Eight pensions have
been awarded so far to veterans exposed to Agent Orange and other
herbicides at Gagetown (and 32 to peacekeepers for exposure in Vietnam
after the January 1973 peace accords), while 1,652 applications have
been filed, the vast majority of them related to Gagetown.
For civilians who worked on the base during the Agent Orange spraying,
the fight for compensation has been even more difficult. A teenager in
the summer of 1966, Ken Dobbie worked at CFB Gagetown cutting and
burning defoliated brush. Dobbie, who now heads the Agent Orange
Association of Canada, has suffered a rash of health problems -- from
diabetes to brain atrophy -- ever since. But civilians aren't eligible
for DVA pensions, so those who claim to have been affected must apply
for worker's compensation. "They wanted my supervisor's signature," says
Dobbie. "Who at CFB Gagetown or at DND am I going to get to sign my
form, 40 years later?"
A total of 22 injury compensation claims
related to Agent Orange exposure have been filed to the Workplace
Health, Safety and Compensation Commission in New Brunswick. Of those,
15 have been rejected. The rest are still under review. But Dobbie's not
waiting anymore: in 2005 he launched a class-action lawsuit in the
Federal Court against the Department of National Defence. After the
government sued Agent Orange manufacturers Dow Chemical Company and
Monsanto Company as third parties, the action moved into the provincial
courts. Class action lawsuits are now being pursued in eight provinces,
and about 2,500 people, represented by lawyer Tony Merchant, have signed
on. The suit in Newfoundland recently became the first to get the
go-ahead when it was certified in the Newfoundland Supreme Court. DND,
Dow and Pharmacia (formerly Monsanto) intend to appeal.
In 2005, shortly after Sellar broke the news about her husband's
pension, Ottawa initiated a fact-finding mission to examine the
herbicide spraying at Gagetown from 1952 to now. Furlong is at its head,
and Chisholm and Sellar both sit on an advisory panel. While Carr notes
that the project (which is to wrap up imminently) has been generally
well-received, it's attracted some controversy. An environmental
consulting company tied to the mission recently threatened to sue Green
party leader Elizabeth May after she publicly criticized it. "[Cantox
Environmental Ltd.] does have a reputation for having done health risk
assessments and generally concluding there isn't a problem," May said in
June, after the company (recently renamed Intrinsik) concluded in most
of its studies that herbicides used at Gagetown posed no health risks.
May did not retract her statement.
Retired Brig.-Gen. Ed Ring spent 34 years in the military, including
several posted at Gagetown in the 1970s and '80s. He now suffers from
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a condition the IOM associates with Agent Orange
exposure). His take on the fact-finding mission is subdued; Ring hasn't
been contacted by them, nor has he sought them out. "I'm sure they're
reputable people," he says. "But it's irrelevant as far as I'm concerned
for the soil to be tested at Gagetown [today]. For me, the damage was
done then, when the stuff was on the ground." Ring is the lead plaintiff
of the class-action suit in Newfoundland.
The most recent fact-finding mission report, released on Tuesday, also
elicited some criticism. The first-ever epidemiological study of the
Gagetown-area population, it concluded that people living there are no
more prone to cancer than those living elsewhere in the province.
Furlong admits the report isn't flawless. It only dates back to 1980,
when medical records were digitized. With a project mandate of 18 months
(that's already been exceeded by half a year), going back any further
just wasn't possible, Furlong says. He stands by the work, noting that
every study put out by the fact-finding project was twice peer-reviewed.
"We can't make assumptions or work on emotion," Furlong says. "We have
to use the best science we have, and that's what we've done."
As of yet, it's unclear what impact these
findings will have on the long-awaited compensation package. Reports
issued by the fact-finding mission are "all being reviewed by the people
who are preparing a package," says the DVA's Summerby, adding that the
information is also drawn upon when rendering decisions on disability
pensions. But for those still awaiting compensation, is it only about
the money? "I suspect it may be to a point," says Ring. "But a lot of
people are looking for some kind of closure. I would like to see this
through, and close the book on it."
-------------------------
Larry Scott --
