Another thing Codario would like to determine is how many of the veteran’s problems are due to the storage of TCDD in their fatty tissues because he believes it may be possible to flush these residues from the human body. But his efforts to test this theory have been hampered by the fact that the VA has done only a very limited fat biopsy study on Vietnam veterans, and when I spoke with him, he had already been waiting for nearly six months for the return of five biopsies.
“I sent the five fat biopsies to Dr. Thomas Tiernan at the Brehm Laboratory at Wright State University because Dr. Tiernan had done research on dioxin for the government and he is considered an ‘independent’ researcher. He was involved in studying dioxin levels on the ship Vulcanus,[15] and seems to be an expert in the field.”
Although dioxin can be stored in the human body for many years, standard laboratory tests, commonly used by the VA in its “Agent Orange examinations” fail to detect traces of dioxin in the blood, urine, or spinal fluid. “They take your blood and urine,” one veteran told me, “and when they don’t find dioxin in it—which they knew goddamn well they wouldn’t in the first place—they conclude that you’re clean, you weren’t exposed to Orange in Nam. Just more fun and games, because they know that TCDD is stored in the fatty tissues of the body. Their own research has shown that.”
The research the veteran refers to is a “blind” study conducted by Dr. Michael Gross of the University of Nebraska, on contract to the Veterans Administration. In this study, thirty grams of fat were removed from twenty Vietnam veterans who believed they had been exposed to Agent Orange. An additional thirty grams were removed from ten veterans who presumably had no contact with Agent Orange and from three US Air Force officers who had done dioxin research. The samples were forwarded to Dr. Gross’s laboratory, where they were analyzed for residues of TCDD-dioxin. Two of the three men who had been described as heavily exposed had TCDD in their fatty tissues of approximately twenty-five to one hundred parts per trillion, while three of the five who were classified as receiving “light exposure” had concentrations of from five to seven parts per trillion. Ten out of the twenty Vietnam veterans had TCDD in their fatty tissues. Two of the control samples contained low levels of TCDD in the abdominal adipose ranging from five to six parts per trillion.1
Called as an expert witness at the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2,4,5-T suspension hearings, Dr. Gross said: “It appears that Vietnam veterans heavily exposed to herbicide Orange will carry low levels of TCDD in their body fat. This conclusion is supported by the observation that two of the three most heavily exposed men have the highest levels detected in this blind study. It is extremely unlikely that this finding is a matter of chance or has occurred because of herbicides or other TCDD-related exposure in the United States. Furthermore, 50 percent of the veterans of Vietnam tested in this study exhibited low levels of TCDD in their abdominal fat whereas only 20 percent of the controls were found to be positive.
“Additional support for this conclusion comes from the replicate analysis of the adipose samples from the ‘heavily exposed’ veterans, and from the validation analysis performed by Mr. Harless. We recognize the need for additional validation studies, and these are planned.
“We propose that the results are relevant to the cancellation hearings. They constitute support for the concept that exposure to TCDD can lead to long-term storage in human fat tissues.”2
Dr. Gross’s discoveries seem to have been received by the VA with the same amount of enthusiasm that the Atomic Energy Commission displayed when informed by John Gofman and other researchers that long-term exposure to low-level radiation could be dangerous, even deadly. In the two years following Dr. Gross’s testimony at the EPA hearings, the Veterans Administration conducted no further tests to determine the extent to which Vietnam veterans may have TCDD in their fatty tissues. However, the VA recently announced that it does intend to conduct further studies on the adipose tissue of veterans.
Should he discover that the fatty tissue of veterans he has examined contain residues of TCDD, Codario will attempt to flush dioxin from their bodies with a drug used to treat victims of kepone poisoning. Kepone is an insecticide which, like dioxin, collects in the fatty tissues of the human body, producing numbness of the hands, headaches, personality changes, and other dioxin-like symptoms. Another similarity between kepone and dioxin is that it is eliminated in the bile fluid, passed into the intestine, and then reabsorbed in the body in what physicians call an enterohepatic cycle. At the University of Virginia, a researcher administering cholestyramine (a bile-salt binder commonly used to treat patients with elevated levels of cholesterol and, in some cases, jaundice) to workers who had high levels of kepone in their bodies discovered that within two months all of the workers showed dramatic improvements, and within one year seven of the twenty-two workers were totally kepone free. The results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine (1978, vol. 298) by Dr. Philip S. Guzelian et al., and Codario believes that Guzelain’s findings may be vital to physicians working with Vietnam veterans or victims of domestic herbicide spraying.
“So if dioxin behaves similarly to kepone, and we have evidence that it does,” says Codario, “it would certainly be tempting to postulate that it could be eliminated from the body by the aid of cholestyramine. And so, once I get the fat biopsies back, I can start giving my patients this drug and doing follow-up examinations to measure for dioxin in their bowel movements. In that manner I can determine if TCDD is actually being washed from their bodies.”
Ronald A. Codario seems to find nothing unusual about the fact that he is doing work that should have been done years ago by the Veterans Administration, or that, without a grant from any of the national health institutes or foundations, he has discovered a medical basis for proving that Vietnam veterans were exposed to Agent Orange and that their exposure is now crippling and killing them. As a specialist in internal medicine he could demand fifty dollars an hour for his advice, yet he donates twenty to thirty hours each week to people whom many Americans still prefer to use as scapegoats for the Vietnam War.
15
In 1970 when the order to stop using Agent Orange in South Vietnam was issued, the US military was left with thousands of fifty-five-gallon drums containing this herbicide. Some of these barrels were stored on Johnston Island in the Pacific, while others went to the Naval Construction Battalion Center at Gulfport, Mississippi. But the drums started to rust and their contents began leaking, making it imperative that something more “final” be done about the surplus stocks of herbicide Orange. In February 1972, the Mississippi Air and Pollution Control Commission ordered that the Agent Orange stored at Gulfport be removed immediately. Faced with this, the Air Force tried returning the remaining stocks of Agent Orange to its manufacturers, who refused to accept the offer. Air Force officials also suggested that the surplus herbicide be disposed of “by the prudent disposition of herbicide Orange for use on privately owned or governmentally owned lands.” This plan also failed and, seven years after the barrels were removed from Vietnam, the EPA finally granted the Air Force a permit to incinerate the remaining stocks of Agent Orange on the German-built ship