'Nam Vets Again Press VA on Agent Orange

Armed with the latest study from the Institute of Medicine, Vietnam Veterans of America is petitioning Veterans Administration Secretary Eric Shinseki to add three illnesses -- including high blood pressure -- to the long list of deadly or debilitating ailments that have been linked to Agent Orange exposure.

The outreach is the latest in a long fight between some Vietnam veterans’ organizations and the U.S. government to connect a wider range of ailments to the chemical defoliant used throughout the conflict to strip away the enemy’s jungle sanctuaries.

“With the body of scientific evidence that currently exists, as well as [your] authority to take immediate action through administrative rulemaking, VVA believes that there is now no factual or legal impediment to presumptive service connection for ischemic heart disease, hypertension, and Parkinson’s disease,” wrote John Rowan, national president of VVA, in a July 27 letter to Shinseki.

A VA spokesman said the agency has formed a working group to review the Institute's findings and will make recommendations to Shinseki when it is finished.

"VA is committed to pursuing all research efforts that improve our understanding of various factors that can potentially support presumption of service-connected disability determinations," spokesman Jim Benson said in an email to Military.com.

And to Rowan, that’s at least a good start.

"This is a big deal," Rowan said in a phone interview July 28 from Louisville, Ky., where the organization is this week holding its 14th biennial meeting. "We sent Shinseki a letter requesting that he listen to the IOM report and add Parkinson's disease, ischemic heart disease and hypertension [high blood pressure] to the list."

A Vietnam vet who contracts any of the illnesses on the VA’s list can seek treatment at VA medical centers and apply for disability compensation.

Benson said the VA working group looking into the institute's findings is being led by the Veterans Health Administration's Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards, and includes representatives from Veterans Benefits Administration and from VA's general counsel, research and development, patient care services and policy and planning offices.

"Recommendations for policy changes, if any, will be made to [Shinseki], who will decide and announce any policy changes that result. We anticipate this process will take several months to changes," Benson said.

Rowan’s organization is also asking Shinseki to reverse past VA decisions to not include hypertension on the list, despite the Institute’s conclusion two years ago of a connection between Agent Orange and high blood pressure.

In 2006 the Institute -- which by law conducts the Agent Orange studies every two years – found "limited or suggestive evidence" of an association between high blood pressure and Agent Orange exposure. But the VA did not include the condition on the list of disease presumed to be caused by exposure to the defoliant, however.

The military sprayed the herbicide throughout Vietnam during the war to bare huge areas of jungle where communist forces were thought to be operating. The chemical also was used to clear areas around military bases. It was also sprayed along the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea in the late 1960s, said Rowan.

For many years after the war the U.S. denied any links between Agent Orange exposure and the various illnesses and cancers developing in veterans. Today, diseases in Vietnam vets that are presumed to be linked to their exposure to the defoliant include cancer of the bronchus, cancer of the larynx, lung cancer, prostate cancer, cancer of the trachea, Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

The list also includes more than 30 types of soft tissue sarcoma, or tumors, as well as Type II diabetes and other illnesses.

Rowan said the previous VA leadership never adequately explained why it would not include hypertension on the list of related conditions, even though the Institute made its case for doing so.

In his petition to Shinseki, Rowan explained that his organization withheld pushing the VA to add hypertension to the list until the new administration got spun up on the issues and solidified its new team at VA.

But with the release of the institute’s latest findings, he wrote, the organization felt it could wait no longer.

In a statement VVA issued immediately following the Institute’s findings, Rowan said his organization continues “to get far too many calls from the children of veterans who wonder if their father’s experiences in Vietnam – and along the [DMZ] in Korea in 1968 and 1969 – has any connection with their health issues and now those of their children.”