More than 20 years have passed
since the Vietnam war ended, but
agent orange continues to live on.
Agent orange is a highly poisonous
herbicide, used as a defoliant for
crops and forest cover. Although
it was used by the Americans for
just two years - to defoliate
the jungles of Vietnam - tens of
thousands of soldiers had been
exposed to it.
A recent study conducted on I
Vietnam war-veterans and their
children, has put a congenital
defect in the vertebral column
called spina bifida - a nerve
disorder causing temporary numbness or pain in the back - in
the second-strongest linkage
category of the study, which is "limited or suggestive evidence of an
association".
The study by the Institute
of Medicine, an affiliate of
the Washington-based National
Academy of Sciences, found
that children born to the warveterans, were exposed to a risk
of contracting spina It that
was 20 times higher than the danger
to which children born to manveterans were exposed.
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