VA Announces Agent Orange Now Harmless! Truly A Miracle!

That's right, boys and girls. Harmless! A VA Miracle! Faced with otherwise convincing proof that the Air Force C-123 transport was certainly contaminated with dioxin, the Veterans Administration Compensation Service resolved the health problems of the exposed aircrew veterans (and kept the VA budget in close check) in a perfectly simple maneouver - dioxin has been redefined by VA as harmless to human health, effective 25 September 2012 and all it took was a simple letter.  Why didn't they think of this earlier?

Still, I'm concerned that this VA miracle managerial decision in the face of science, logic, law and justice will somehow not relieve the worries of 1560 aircrew, maintenance and aerial port veterans who flew the C-123 between the years 1972-1982. The C-123 was the transport used for spraying Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and in April 2011 veterans learned that the airplanes remained "heavily contaminated" and "a danger to public health" after the war while flown by the Air Force Reserve.

The C-123 veterans' struggle with the VA began in April 2011. The VA quickly hit back with official arguments that, although the airplanes were contaminated, veterans couldn't have been exposed therein. VA also created a new concept called "dry dioxin transfer" to help prevent all valid claims, using that unscientific idea to explain away how veterans could have worked in close contact with the toxin without any harm.

But their 25 September announcement about TCDD being harmless does an even more perfect job and completes the full-circle argument of preventing dioxin-exposed veterans access to medical care:

1. veterans couldn't have been exposed aboard the C-123, because the VA says so.
2. even if veterans were exposed, "dry dioxin transfer" meant that kind of exposure wouldn't have harmed them. In the C-123, dioxin was somehow safe to be around for the decade we flew it.
3. and finally, even if veterans were exposed via the typical paths of exposure (dermal, ingestion, inhalation) no harm could come to them because, quoting the new rule...dioxin is harmless anyway! 

Don't worry....be happy! VA has decided that science and medicine had it wrong all along, especially those pesky independent scientists who helped prepare the Institute on Medicine reports on Agent Orange. 

Golly, the Department of Veterans Affairs should have saved a lot of money from the very beginning by simply creating their "harmless" statement at the beginning of American's concern about this, the most toxic of all substances and a known human carcinogen. The Department of Veterans Affairs should have kept veterans from a lot of worry about our exposure by posting their simple decree which explained "In summary, there is no conclusive evidence that TCDD exposure causes any adverse health effects."

The source of this marvelous news about Agent Orange not being responsible for our cancers, diabetes, perhiperial neuropathy, and other diseases is the VA's Director, Compensation and Pension (C&P). C&P simply applied businessman's common sense approach which requires budget considerations above all others, The Director of Compensation Services announced his "harmless" decision via his denial of a C-123 veteran's claim for Agent Orange exposure illnesses.to the Agent Orange controversy with his denial of a veteran's Agent Orange claim, stating TCDD isn't known to cause harm.  


Fellow veterans - do you draw comfort from C&P's Amazing Miracle Show?