More like ignorant society. It's not like US media helps with any of it either. Between continual divide and conquer via racial tension and lack of critically thought discourse Americans are kept distracted by design while the thieves continue to swindle them.
This usually happens when people are blessed with too many riches and comfort and convenience. Usually humans start to critically think when true opportunities line up on one end of the spectrum and when the proverbial hits the fan on the other side.
Scientific truth has nothing to do with politics, LOL. According to you, scientific truth is determined by politics. Well if you're right, then the cleanup cost is ridiculously low. Fact is that the money spent is spent to make complaining people happy. Still zero scientific evidence for a relationship between dioxin and birth defects. Or between dioxin and cancer.
Your first link is the only peer reviewed article. It shows that that the Vietnamese papers exaggerate the relationship and the more reliable English language papers place the risk at only a 29% increase in birth defects. This is the *average* level and it is so low as to be difficult to detect, especially since many of the articles that contribute to the study have defects that tend to bias in favor of showing a relationship where there is none. If you look at the average among the best studies, you find no evidence for a relationship. For comparison, a lifetime of smoking increases your chance of getting lung cancer by around 1400% to 2900% (according to the CDC, see: http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm ). Note that with smoking, the effect is to a particular organ. With dioxin, the effect doesn't specify which organ. This makes it very difficult to (a) explain from a biological point of view and (b) difficult to detect. No such detection has been yet found. And again, look at how small the effect is, you're talking about an effect that is 100x less than that of smoking. The effect is lost in the noise. The second link is not a peer reviewed paper but even it notes that "The study reported a large amount of heterogeneity between studies, a finding consistent with the lack of scientific consensus on the issue." Uh, "heterogeneity" is a fancy scientific term meaning that the studies don't agree with each other, LOL. What's going on is that when people have data that show an effect they publish it. When they have data that doesn't show an effect they do not. The result is that the majority of papers show small effects. This is not convincing science; it's why the elementary particle people want "5 sigma" data before they announce a new particle. As your own paper shows, there is "a lack of scientific consensus on the issue". This is completely contrary to your claim that "almost every study" shows an effect. Did you even read your links??? The third link is from the US CDC and shows no indication of a relationship with birth defects and only a possible relationship with cancer in mice. But it is the nature of the cancer studies that roughly half the chemical they test, whether it is natural or man-made, can be "shown" to cause cancer. But the test they use is known to be defective in that it shows that many chemicals "cause" cancer when actually they do not have any such effect in the real world. The way cancer tests work is that they first determine how much of the chemical is required to kill a mouse. Then they feed the mice a very high fraction of that amount. The result is that the mouse's body spends all its effort trying to replace the massive numbers of cells that the excess chemical amounts are killing off. Eventually a cell has an error and cancer results. This is unrealistic because the amounts of chemical applied are far far in excess of what anyone is exposed to in real life. These are the studies that show, for example, that sweeteners cause cancer when test animals are exposed to amounts that a human would see if they drunk 5000 cases of soft drink per day. The defects in how government determines which chemicals cause cancer are well known to science. Government continues to do it the easy way, which identifies innocuous chemicals as dangerous, because it's convenient and easy. Here's an article that describes the problems with tests like the ones quoted in the CDC article: Misconceptions About the Causes of Cancer Gold, Ames and Slone Summary The major causes of cancer are: 1) smoking, which accounts for 31% of U.S. cancer deaths and 87% of lung cancer deaths; 2) dietary imbalances which account for about another third, e.g., lack of sufficient amounts of dietary fruits and vegetables. 3) chronic infections, mostly in developing countries; and 4) hormonal factors, which are influenced primarily by lifestyle. There is no cancer epidemic except for cancer of the lung due to smoking. Cancer mortality rates have declined 19% since 1950 (excluding lung cancer). Regulatory policy that focuses on traces of synthetic chemicals is based on misconceptions about animal cancer tests. Recent research indicates that rodent carcinogens are not rare. Half of all chemicals tested in standard high-dose animal cancer tests, whether occurring naturally or produced synthetically, are “carcinogens”; there are high-dose effects in rodent cancer tests that are not relevant to low-dose human exposures and which contribute to the high proportion of chemicals that test positive. The focus of regulatory policy is on synthetic chemicals, although 99.9% of the chemicals humans ingest are natural. More than 1000 chemicals have been described in coffee: 30 have been tested and 21 are rodent carcinogens. Plants in the human diet contain thousands of natural “pesticides” produced by plants to protect themselves from insects and other predators: 71 have been tested and 37 are rodent carcinogens. There is no convincing evidence that synthetic chemical pollutants are important as a cause of human cancer. Regulations targeted to eliminate low levels of synthetic chemicals are expensive. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that environmental regulations cost society $140 billion/year. Others have estimated that the median toxic control program costs 146 times more per hypothetical life-year saved than the median medical intervention. Attempting to reduce tiny hypothetical risks has other costs as well: if reducing synthetic pesticides makes fruits and vegetables more expensive, thereby decreasing consumption, then the cancer rate will increase, especially for the poor. The prevention of cancer will come from knowledge obtained from biomedical research, education of the public, and lifestyle changes made by individuals. A re-examination of priorities in cancer prevention, both public and private, seems called for. ... Approximately half of all chemicals that have been tested in standard animal cancer tests, whether natural or synthetic, are rodent carcinogens (Table 4) (61-64). Why such a high positivity rate? In standard cancer tests, rodents are given chronic, near-toxic doses, the maximum tolerated dose (MTD). Evidence is accumulating that cell division caused by the high dose itself, rather than the chemical per se, is increasing the positivity rate. High doses can cause chronic wounding of tissues, cell death, and consequent chronic cell division of neighboring cells, which is a risk factor for cancer (65). Each time a cell divides the probability increases that a mutation will occur, thereby increasing the risk for cancer. At the low levels to which humans are usually exposed, such increased cell division does not occur. The process of mutagenesis and carcinogenesis is complicated because many factors are involved: e.g., DNA lesions, DNA repair, cell division, clonal instability, apoptosis, and p53 (a cell cycle control gene that is mutated in half of human tumors) (66, 67). The normal endogenous level of oxidative DNA lesions in somatic cells is appreciable (19). In addition, tissues injured by high doses of chemicals have an inflammatory immune response involving activation of white cells in response to cell death (68-75). Activated white cells release mutagenic oxidants (including peroxynitrite, hypochlorite, and H2O2). Therefore, the very low levels of chemicals to which humans are exposed through water pollution or synthetic pesticide residues may pose no or only minimal cancer risks. http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cpdb/pdfs/Paustenbach.pdf
Do you discuss your paranoid delusions with professionals? I agree with you that the society is ignorant, but we probably differ on exactly what they are ignorant of, LOL.
When politicians clash, that's a good sign, it means they are actually fighting for something. You should be worried when they're all smiling and palm pressing as then you know the people are getting screwed.
No, it is common sense. If the US admits to civilian casualties and damages during the Vietnam War, for example, then you can be dead sure that damage was indeed done. Others on your administration's side have done the fact checking already else they would not be shelling out millions of dollars, regardless of paltry those sums actually are in relation tot he damage done. But then for the die-hards, you can always be honest and read up on the facts. d08 has provided you with enough factual information, you can of course choose to continue to deny the truth and paste stupid articles about cancer. How much more ridiculous can it get? Are you a war veteran?
what a time wasting exercise. People who deny the US has causes civilian casualties and damage in every conflict they waged war are on par with people who deny the holocaust. And ironically, those same people dare to use the term "facts"...
The primary use of Agent Orange / Dioxin in the US is that it's a convenient way to get more medical care for veterans. For that, it is supported by the Republican party as support for military veterans and the Democrat party because of their fears of chemical contamination. Here is the list of diseases that veterans can get care for based on the presumption that it is caused by dioxin exposure: http://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/agentorange/conditions/index.asp Of the above laughably long list, the only one that is scientifically supported as caused by dioxin exposure is chloracne. The others are a grab bag of things that appear naturally in humans. For example, it includes "prostate cancer" even though US Vietnam veterans are now reaching the age where males normally get prostate cancer with about 50% having it at age 60 and any relationship will be swamped by the natural rate. The fact is that if you're willing to conclude that covariance implies causality, you can conclude that almost anything is caused by almost anything else. That's not science. And in this case, it's politics. You're confusing a "US health program for veterans" with "scientific evidence". We provide health care for our veterans. This has nothing to do with science. Two different worlds.
He is just going around in circles. Dioxins cause major health issues which is a fact and the concentrations found in US bases in Vietnam had very high concentrations of said dioxins, it's as simple as that. Why is he talking about the low levels that are found commonly, Vietnam had very high levels of said dioxins. Obfuscation through talking about smoking is irrelevant. Yes, you're also in more danger if you live in the Chernobyl reactor but what kind of a comparison is that? PCBs also act like dioxins and have caused major health issues everywhere around the world (Japan, China, US). And like the imperialists of the past, he is quick to call the Vietnamese paper an exaggeration while the English language papers must certainly be correct, what interesting logic. America isn't objective at all about its past crimes, therefore all other (non-US) sources should be treated as credible if they follow scientific guidelines.