Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 19, 2002

Volume 30, Number 26

Arthur H. Westing

Conference to explore Agent Orange's effect
on Vietnam's people and environment

The lingering effects of herbicides such as Agent Orange on the people and environment of Vietnam will be discussed in a conference being held at Yale on Friday, April 26.

"Return to Vietnam: The Legacy of Agent Orange" will take place 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. in Horchow Hall, 55 Hillhouse Ave. The event is sponsored by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and its Bioethics Project.

In the 1960s, U.S. military forces unleashed on Vietnam the largest chemical warfare operation in history, in the form of an aerial spray designed to defoliate the trees hiding ground movement along the Ho Chi Minh trail. In all, 71 million liters of herbicide containing 51 million kilograms of active ingredients were used in the region's forests and croplands.

In the 30 years since the spraying ended, there have been no efforts to address the ecological damage caused by the herbicidal chemicals or the public health problems produced by dioxins that contaminated the herbicidal preparations.

Earlier this year, however, the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (part of the National Institutes of Health) and its counterpart in Vietnam sponsored a meeting in Hanoi, where scientists from both nations discussed the nature of the problem and potential remedies.

The Yale conference will include talks by three experts:

* Arthur H. Westing, former director of the United Nations Environmental Programme project on "Peace, Security and the Environment," who will talk about "Herbicide-mediated Vegetational and Ecological Damage." A researcher for the U.S. Forest Service and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, he has written about ecological damage in nations around the world. He is the founder and head of Westing Associates in Environmental Security and Education, and has been a consultant on environmental security for the World Bank, the Red Cross, the government of Etritrea, and other international and national organizations. His many honors include being appointed to the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor.

* Arnold Schechter, a public health physician and professor of the environmental sciences at the University of Texas School of Public Health at Dallas, who will discuss "Dioxin-mediated Health Hazards Among the Vietnamese People." Schechter has worked in Vietnam on Agent Orange since 1964, coordinating an international team of public health workers and researchers. He was the first to demonstrate how dioxin exposure could be measured in humans, and his work showed that Vietnamese living in certain areas sprayed by Agent Orange have highly elevated dioxin levels.

* Arthur Galston, the Eaton Professor Emeritus of Botany and senior research scientist in Yale's Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, who will present opening remarks on "The Defoliation Campaign" and later give a presentation titled "The Conference in Hanoi: A Summation." Galston, who is also professor emeritus of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is an expert on chemical control of plant growth. His concerns about the social impacts of science led to his participation in a successful campaign to terminate the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1970. He served on the Federation of American Scientists' Committee on Biological Warfare and was president of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the mid-1970s.

The three experts will also join in a panel discussion with Linda Spoonster Schwartz, associate research scientist and scholar in nursing at the Yale School of Nursing. Schwartz, who served as a nurse during the Vietnam War, is a national spokesperson on behalf of veterans' issues and has focused her research on the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans. She chairs the Vietnam Veterans Association's National Veterans Health Care Task Force, helped create the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Women Veterans and served as a regional coordinator for the Vietnam Women's Project.

The conference will include a light lunch. While admission is free and open to the public, participants should make reservations by calling Carol Pollard at (203) 432-6188 or sending her an e-mail message at carol.pollard@yale.edu.

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