ortedly on instruction from Washington, the and the United States Embassy have formed Be fects of the defoliation program, especially

sue has foreciosed official comment, but according to na sogy office of the command is responsible for > und esis hat embassy officials will then evalu

3, verriment regards the entire subject as taboo. Vietko sayonied for udbshing articles about birth ne deitilaites, and the public Health Ministry SONOù "Wimai and aduermal births.

t

De Unericans is shared by many South Neid in WWU edicia's and villagers interviewed in a

des and officials say they know virtually

Ce (demies' spess

Saigon's leading maternity hospital, Tudu, from which rumors of an increase of abnormal births emanate periodically, has not even compiled annual reports of statistics for the last three years. Recent monthly figures show an average of about 140 miscarriages and 150 premature births among approximately 2,800 pregnancies, but the hospital is not prepared to say whether this represents an increase and, if so, what the cause might be.

A high Agriculture Ministry official said: "I don't think the Americans would use the chemicals if they were harmful."

He conceded that his ministry had made no tests and asserted that his experts had been unable to get any information about the defoliants from the Defense Ministry, which considers such data secret. The main defoliant compounds and some information about them are available in the United States.

Last Oct. 29, President Nixon's science adviser, Dr. Lee A. Du Bridge, announced that as a result of a study showing that one of the defoliants used, 2,4,5-T, had caused an unexpectedly high incidence of fetal deformities in mice and rats, the compound would henceforth be restricted to areas remote from population.

That directive appears to be ambiguous in South Vietnam for military spokesmen assert that 2,4,5-T continues to be used only in "enemy staging areas"-by definition populated regions.

DEFOLIANTS WERE CONCEALED

Don That Trinh, Minister of Agriculture from November, 1967 to May, 1968, and for 10 years professor of agronomy at Saigon University, said that while he was minister, the Defense Ministry "would try to conceal the defoliant products from me."

"I did not believe in defoliation," he added.

According to one of the Vietnamese directors of a Government research laboratory in Saigon: "We didn't know anything before the United States started spraying. It was only when we received complaints from the livestock people that we started getting interested." But, he added, there are still no Vietnamese studies.

Even the village of Tanhiep, 20 miles north of Saigon, on which 1,000 gallons of defoliants were jettisoned on Dec. 1, 1968, has not been the object of attention or study.

An American C-123 flying out of Bienhoa air base, Northeast of Saigon, developed engine trouble shortly after takeoff. To lighten the craft, the pilot sprayed the full load of chemicals over Tanhiep and nearby Binhtri in 30 seconds instead of the usual 4 minutes 30 seconds, which spreads the defoliant at the rate of three gallons an acre in unpopulated areas.

The defoliant involved, according to the United States command, was a 50-50 mixture of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetate, or 2,4-D, and 2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetate, or 2,4,5-T, in an oil base. It is one of three compounds the military says it uses here, the others being a Dow chemical product called Tordon 101, a mixture of amine salts of 2,4-D and Picloram, and an arsenic compound of cacodylic acid.

No physicians visited Tanhiep to examine the people after their exposure, which, like eight similar emergency dumpings since 1968-some over unpopulated forests-was not made public by the United States command.

A United States Air Force medical team visited Binhtri shortly after the spraying and, according to American district officials, found the villagers had suffered no ill effects. There was no later inquiry.

Mrs. Tran Thi Tien of Tanhiep, hwo says she has four normal children, is convinced that the malfunction of her son, who still looks like a newborn at 14 months of age, "must be due to the chemicals I breathed."

Her neighbors, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Hai and Mrs. Tong Thi An, blame the spraying for the fact that their children, one year and 20 months old respectively, still crawl instead of walk.

Nguyen Van Nhap, a farmer, complains of suffering bouts of fever, sneezing and weakness.

"I was working in the field when the spray came down," Mrs. Tien said through an interpreter. "I felt dizzy, like vomiting and had to stay in bed three or four days."

Many other villagers reported feeling the same sensations as Mrs. Tien, but, except for the two children described as retarded in learning to walk, no other abnormal children were described to visitors at the village of 1,200 residents.

Tran Van Dang, a farmer in neighboring Binhtri, recalled that three days after the spraying two villagers, Tam Ten and Mrs. Hai Mua, died after suffering respiratory difficulties and trembling. The next day, he said, a third villager, Mrs. Hai Nuc, died after showing similar symptoms. Mr. Ten was an old man and could have been expected to die soon anyway but the two others, Mr. Dang said, were middle-aged and seemed healthy.

Such complaints are not limited to Tanhiep and Binhtri, where villagers were admittedly exposed to concentrated doses of defoliant-though just how concentrated has not been established.

In Bienhoa city, 10 miles from Tanhiep, any defoliant in the air drifts down from the heavily sprayed battle areas to the north.

Dr. Nguyen Son Cao says he finds a clear correlation between the days when there is spraying and the number of patients who come in with respiratory ailments, mostly sneezing and coughing.

Dr. Cao, who has been practicing in Bienhoa for 21 years, said he had also noticed that in the last two to three years the number of miscarriages among his patients had doubled.

"These women are convinced they are the victims of the chemicals," he said. "I only suspect there could be a relationship. This suspicion is very well known. The increase in miscarriages is very obvious, very significant."

However, the manager of another clinic reported no increase in miscarriages over the last several years.

Any increase in miscarriages has many possible explanations: perhaps the deterioration of the daily diet, the cumulative effect of the hardships of war, population and economic movements that register statistics of only certain groups, or air pollution, of which the defoliant chemicals are a part.

Appendix 2

DEFOLIANTS, DEFORMITIES: WHAT RISK?

Dr. Jackie Verrett is fascinated and horrified by what has now become an everyday sight at her FDA toxicology lab in Washington, D.C.: several white leghorn chicks struggling to get to their feet and then finally walking-on their knees. Besides slipped tendons in their legs, some of the chicks have cleft palates and beak deformities. All this has been wrought by injecting fertilized eggs with an ethanol solution containing just 2.5 micromicrograms (or 50 parts per trillion) of 2,3,6,7-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, a contaminant in 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T).

Over the past nine years, 40 million pounds of this defoliating herbicide have been sprayed in very heavy concentrations across at least five million acres of Vietnam to destroy crops and expose the enemy. By мWN's reckoning, some 30 million pounds have been spewed out in lesser concentrations during just the past five years across perhaps 30 million acres of range, forest, and farmland (not to mention home gardens) in the U.S-an area three times the size of Texas.

Thus, Dr. Verrett's preliminary findings are not just of interest to poultrymen. The 11 crippled chicks in her study were among 15 survivors of a clutch of 25 eggs. In the unhatched chicks, Dr. Verrett found pronounced evidence of chick edema-swollen tissues, cysts on the back, necrotic livers, and the same deformities the live birds have. The FDA researcher is diluting the dioxin content to try to find a "no effects" level. In another brood, she has produced a similar pattern of birth defects with just 21⁄2 parts per trillion of dioxin, 1/400,000 the 1 ppm found in currently marketed products. Now she's experimenting with .25 parts per trillion. (The work is so politically sensitive that she doesn't even know the origin of the 2,4,5-T involved and feels "like I'm in the CIA.")

When told that HEW Secretary Robert Finch is doubtful about the applicability of the chick embryo work to human risk, Dr. Verrett snapped, "I know, I know, but the only time Bob Finch sees eggs is when he eats them for breakfast."

While Dr. Verrett labored in the lab early this month, Dr. Samuel Epstein, chief of toxicology at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, was out in Globe, a foothill town in southeastern Arizona, to evaluate reports of toxic and

teratogenic effects attending the spraying of 2,4,5-T and its chemical cousin, 2(2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxy) proprionic Acid (Silver) in adjacent Tonto National Forest. These reports have disturbed the nation and drawn experts to the

scene.

ODD EFFECTS AROUND GLOBE

In Globe, Dr. Epstein saw two goats and a duck with leg deformities similar to those in Dr. Verrett's chickens, and studied the histories of sick people. "It's impossible to say for certain whether the claimed symptoms and effects are attributable to the spray," he said. But at the same time he lashed out at the U.S. Forest Service for risking the contamination of water sources against its own policy, for contributing to drift by using water as a 2,4,5-T solvent, and for failing to post the area before spraying.

MWN found that the Department of Agriculture keeps such casual tabs of 2,4,5-T spraying that it would take officials a week just to find which of the 33 national forests besides Tonto have been bombed with the two million pounds Forest Service has jetted out over the past six years. "But Interior uses more than we do," said one official. Replies an Interior spokesman, "We used only 44,232 pounds last year."

In the Globe area, the Forest Service has sprayed 2,4,5-T and Silver four of the past five years to promote growth of grass in a burned-over section and to eliminate chaparral. But most 2,4,5-T use is unmonitored. The defoliant is bought by ranchers and private foresters and it's pretty much up to them what happens to it.

Human teratogenicity is the chief worry; it is fairly well known by now that Dr. Verrett's work is not the first study to dramatize the risk. Yet MWN learned that the U.S. doesn't keep nationwide birth-defect figures.

Dr. Edward Burger of the government's Office of Science and Technology does not seem worried by this absence of monitoring and supervision, nor, indeed, about the risk of 2,4,5-T teratogenicity. Dr. Burger, technical assistant to Presidential science advisor Lee A. DuBridge, acknowledges that a study done by Bionetics Research Laboratories for the National Cancer Institute showed last March (it was suppressed for six months) that nearly all offspring of mice and rats given 2,4,5-T early in gestation at the relatively high levels of 21.5 mg/kg or 46.4 mg/kg were born dead or deformed-in some cases with no eyes, with cleft palates, and cystic kidneys and enlarged livers. Even at 4.6 mg/kg dosage, 39% of the animals were born malformed.

The OST expert is more familiar than most with the high-level decisionmaking that went into Dr. DuBridge's declaration October 29 that on the basis of the Bionetics study, the use of 2,4,5-T in populated areas would be restricted. Dr. DuBridge said Agriculture would, by Jan. 1, 1970, withdraw licenses for its use on crops (corn, bluberries, peaches, pears, and several leafy vegetables) unless the FDA found that the residue was negligible and humans were tolerant of it.

Dr. Burger explains that the FDA missed this deadline for a number of reasons. First, Dow Chemical Co., a major maker of 2,4,5-T, discovered last December that the sample used by Bionetics contained 27 ppm of the tetrachloro dioxin instead of the "less than 1 ppm" Dow says is in its product. So the study is now being re-run with a Dow sample at Dow labs in Zionsville, Ind., and Midland, Mich., and at the National Institute Environmental Health Sci

ences.

Next, says Dr. Burger, even after the teratogenic potential is re-evaluated in a rodent model, the disappearance rate of the contaminant in the animal blood stream must be determined and calibrated with that in human volunteers. He concludes: "The possibility of exposure to 2,4,5-T, vis-a-vis the small teratogenic risk, is certainly not sufficient at this time to justify wiping the chemical off the market."

Comments Associate FDA Commissioner for Science Dale Lindsay: "Dr. DuBridge had no damned business setting a tolerance deadline. Our marketbasket surveys for 1968 and 1969-thousands of samples of 120 foods and vegetables are constantly being assessed-show only five recoveries of 2,4,5-T— three from leafy vegetables at negligible levels, plus one from milk, and one from meat at the .01-mg level.

"Yet if we had to set a tolerance today it would be zero. The trouble with this very active dioxin contaminant is that while it may be a known quantity in a product, you can't extract it in the same quantity."

Harvard microbiologist Matthew Meselson is worried for the same reason— and many others. Dr. Meselson-appointed last year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to head a 2,4,5-T evaluation projectsays: "The tetrachloro dioxin represents just one of 12 or 13 ways the chlorine atoms can arrange themselves on a benzene ring to form dioxin molecules. How do we know about the hexa, hepta, and octychlors, or about how persistent the tetrachlor itself is? Moreover, I'm very concerned about the dioxins that might be formed by unreacted trichlorphenol [2,4,5-T precursor] when the product is exposed to heat. If it were taken up by plants or wood and these were burned, you'd get more dioxin. Finally, I'm bothered by the bizarre mental effects suffered by German workers making 2,4,5-T. I say when in doubt, stop it."

Dr. Julius Johnson, vice president and director of research for Dow, regards these concerns as speculative. "If we thought 2,4,5-T was harming anybody we'd take it off the market tomorrow," he says. "We've been dedicated to cleaning it up ever since 1964 [when the contaminant was linked to an outbreak of chlor-acne in Dow workers at Midland]." Dr. Johnson says it would take a 200-degree jolt to produce reaction of dioxin, and the contaminant disappears within hours under ultraviolet light. So far, he adds, Dow tests show that its 2,4,5-T has no teratogenic effect on rats at a dosage of 24 mg/kg and on rabbits at 40 mg/kg. But how about Dr. Verrett's new findings in the chick embryo test? The Dow executive confesses surprise. "But I'm confident," he says, "that we'll be safe when we propose a new specification for all 2,4,5-T products of .1 ppm of dioxin."

Safety also assumes gauges of teratogenicity in the population, however. FDA's Dr. Lindsay spoke with certitude when he told MWN that "the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke has recorded birth defects for some 15 years and would be telling us if they were on the rise." He's wrong. Dr. Heinz Berendes, chief of NINDS' perinatal research branch, admits dolefully that "no nationwide data are available on frequency or incidence of malformation."

Adds Yale biologist Arthur Galston: "It's shocking, but absolutely no studies have been made in Vietnam either. There have been reports of birth defects in Saigon papers since last June but hospital records haven't been made available."

State Department officials say they know of no policy whereby such data would be classified or withheld. Significantly, however, Dr. Malcolm Phelps, chief of the Vietnam medical section of the Agency for International Development, says he is acting on a recent White House request to collect figures on teratological occurrences in Vietnam civilian hospitals.

As for all the toxic effects reported by Globe residents after the June 8-11 spraying-a helicopter released 935 gallons of Silver, 30 of 2,4,5-T, and 20 gallons of a combination called "Orange" over 1,900 acres of forest-an MwN reporter inquired into the histories of 18 patients with four of the five doctors who treated them, and checked on the two crippled goats, the crippled duck, a bleeding bull terrier, and two other dogs with pneumonia. Net result: two strongly suspected herbicide poisoning cases linked to the spraying, and one "definite." There's one-year-old Paul McCray, who lives on the edge of Tonto National Forest and whose father drove the family right up to the 'copter landing spot during spraying. The boy has had respiratory attacks and convulsions. Phoenix pediatrician W. Scott Chisholm finds Paul has lymphositosis, with a white cell count twice normal.

The second suspected case, a smeltery worker named James Andrews who has complained of a number of symptoms associated with herbicide poisoning -nausea, muscle weakness, vertigo, numbness, and stabbing pain-is vouchsafed by Dr. Granville Knight of Santa Monica, Calif. In the third case, that of Mrs. Billee Shoecraft, Dr. Knight says he has found 2-4-D in tissue.

Dr. Bernard Collopy would not label the muscle spasms and stabbing pain suffered by potter Robert McKusick, owner of the defective goats and ducks, as herbicide-related. Dr. William Bishop would not credit the chest pains of Bob McCray, father of little Paul, or his wife's tingling fingers and toes, as 2,4,5-T or Silver poisoning. And veterinarian F. I. Skinner hadn't seen any of the animal cases.

Sums up Dr. Bishop: "There's a good possibility some of the human cases are related to spraying, but symptomatic connections aren't connections and