Toxic Epidemics: Agent Orange Sickness in Vietnam and the United States

ABSTRACT

Social scientists studying toxic epidemics have often endeavored to shed light on the differences between scientists’ and nonscientists’ epistemic perspectives. Yet, little attention has been paid to the processes through which a toxic epidemic emerges as a phenomenon. A Luoi Valley of Central Vietnam was extensively sprayed with chemical defoliants (including Agent Orange) during the Vietnam War. The latent toxic effects of these chemicals, however, went largely unnoticed until the late 1990s. By juxtaposing the history through which the notion of “Agent Orange Sickness” emerged in the United States with an ethnographic study of A Luoi, I explore the notion of poison under which Agent Orange became recognizable as a poison.

KEYWORDS:

• Agent Orange Sickness
• poison
• population
• toxic epidemic
• Vietnam War

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the interviewees and friends in A Luoi, Hue City and Hanoi, especially my research assistant, for their insights and generosity. This article came out of my doctoral dissertation written at McGill University’s Department of Anthropology. The research was approved by McGill’s Research Ethics Office. This article benefited much from constructive comments, in particular, by Ellen Corin, Allan Young, Tobias Rees, Sarah Turner, Laurence Cohen and Tim Connallon. Finally, special thanks to the journal’s editor, and three anonymous reviewers for their critical comments.

Funding

I am grateful to the McGill Internal SSHRC Research Grant for helping fund the research.

Notes

1. See McElwee (2008) for further details. The Kinh majority now constitutes a quarter of the population of A Luoi.

2. Personal communication with the members of Hatfield Consultants and 10/80 Committee.

3. Personal communication with ecologists and physicians in Hanoi.

4. I refer here to the survey conducted in order to determine the eligibility to receive Agent Orange related compensation from the government, which began in 2001. ’(QD 26/2000/QD-TTg (http://laws.dongnai.gov.vn, accessed July 13, 2012).

5. Simon Wessley (2001) has used the terms “Agent Orange Syndrome” in parallel to “Gulf War Syndrome.” However, I think ‘Agent Orange Sickness’ is the most appropriate expression, as the consequences of Agent Orange do not constitute an aggregate of overlapping symptoms of unknown causes that occur in each individual, but is an aggregate of medically recognized diseases that occur in different individuals. It is also more a forensic category than a clinical category.

6. See also: Stephenson v. Dow et al. (05-1760-cv) Brief for Plaintiff Appellee [2007].

7. I do not know how common this was at the General Hospital of Hue City where Binh took her daughter. In places like Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, long before Agent Orange became a nationwide issue, physicians made it their practice to warn the parents about further conception, if their babies were suspected of being born with birth defects due to Agent Orange. (Personal communication with a physician in Hanoi.)

8. Their answers may have been affected by their knowledge of Kinh majority’s prejudice.

Additional information

Funding

I am grateful to the McGill Internal SSHRC Research Grant for helping fund the research.

Notes on contributors

Tak Uesugi

Tak Uesugi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Osaka University.