DISTRIBUTE TO ALL LISTS
FLASH UPDATE
http://agentorangezone.blogspot.com/
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2011/oct/01/anthony-westbury-veterans-keep-waiting-for-their/
Cathryn Currie of St. Lucie West is sick of waiting.
She has spent the
past two years going back and forth with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
over disability payments for her Vietnam veteran husband's service-related
illnesses.
Sadly, her husband, Tech. Sgt. William C. Currie, couldn't
wait anymore.
He died in January, suffering from dementia, prostate
cancer and Parkinson's Disease that the VA agreed in 2010 were a result of his
exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange during two tours in Vietnam.
Over
the past two years, his widow has amassed a mountain of paperwork relating to
the claim, and the VA keeps asking for the same information over and over, she
said.
"Are they waiting for me to die, too?," Currie, 77, wonders. She
calls the VA's Pension Maintenance Center in Philadelphia "a broken-down
business."
READ MORE:
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2011/oct/01/anthony-westbury-veterans-keep-waiting-for-their/
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southeast/2011/09/29/217902.htm
Monsanto Co. has lost a bid to close part of a lawsuit alleging the company
caused health injuries to residents living near a plant that made the Vietnam
War-era U.S. military defoliant “Agent Orange.”
Monsanto, which operated
a Nitro, West Virginia, chemical plant from 1934 to 2000, argued it was working
as a government contractor and therefore protected from certain claims related
to its waste disposal at that facility.
But U.S. District Judge Paul
Gardephe in New York on Wednesday rejected the company’s request for partial
summary judgment based on its “government contractor defense” and said the suit,
filed in 2009 by West Virginia residents, could proceed.
Monsanto
spokesman Thomas Helscher said the case related to “the former Monsanto company
from over 40 years ago.”
“Although the motion has been denied at this
time, we remain confident that we will prevail on the merits at the trial of
this case,” Helscher said.
In his written ruling, Gardephe cited the 2nd
Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upholding a trial court’s finding in signature
Agent Orange litigation.
“Here, there is no evidence that the U.S.
government was ever aware of the alleged open pit burning practice, much less
that it had evaluated the hazard posed by such a practice,” Gardephe said.
“Because defendants have not demonstrated that the complained-of activity —
the open pit burning of dioxin waste at the Nitro plant — was conducted
‘pursuant to reasonably precise government specifications,’ their motion for
summary judgment based on the government contractor defense must be denied,” the
judge said.
Monsanto manufactured a herbicide — 2,4,5-
trichlorophenoxyacacidic acid (“2,4,5-T”) — a compound used in “Agent Orange,”
so-called in the Vietnam War because of the orange color of the barrels in which
it was stored.
Plaintiffs Mary Spaulding and Sandy Spaulding lived in the
Nitro area during the period of Monsanto’s activities and said they suffered
injuries from being exposed to the harmful chemicals, which are also known as
dioxins, due to negligence disposal practices by Monsanto.
In the
lawsuit, plaintiffs allege Monsanto disposed of the dangerous dioxin waste by
burning the materials in open pits. They said the dioxin also contaminated
soils.
In 1984, seven chemical companies, including Dow Chemical and
Monsanto, agreed to a $180 million settlement with U.S. veterans who claimed
that agent orange caused health problems.
The case is Mary Spaulding and
Sandy Spaulding v. Monsanto Company, U.S. District Court for the Southern
District of New York, No. 09-09470.
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2011/09/2011928111920665336.html
Fifty years ago this month, in the early stages of the Vietnam War, the US
military began spraying rural areas of the country with the herbicide, Agent
Orange. The programme's goal was to defoliate forested land, depriving the enemy
Viet Cong of cover and driving peasants to the cities, thus destroying the Viet
Cong's support base and food supply.
Over the next 10 years more than 80
million litres were deployed across 7.4 million hectares of Vietnam, eastern
Laos and parts of Cambodia. They were an effective defoliant, but there is
strong evidence that the deadly dioxins contained in Agent Orange also had a
catastrophic effect on the health of millions of Vietnamese – killing hundreds
of thousands and causing dreadful diseases and birth defects in subsequent
generations right up to this day.
Thousands of US servicemen - men who
handled the herbicide and who operated in areas where it was deployed - were
affected too, and they and their families eventually won compensation through
the courts. But attempts to get similar US financial aid for the Vietnamese
victims, or even much help with a clean up of polluted land, have been less
successful.
With many areas of Vietnam still poisoned by the dioxin and
the country's hard pressed health and welfare services struggling to support
those suffering, this film by Risto Vuorinen tells the remarkable story of the
children of Agent Orange and a group of US veterans in Vietnam who are trying to
atone for the mistakes of the past.