Help Us Help You

The Agent Orange/Dioxin and Other Toxic Substances Committee wishes each of you a Happy New Year. Since the last committee meeting in October, members have been busy working on various issues. George Claxton has done a fantastic job providing us with scientific studies. Mokie Porter is hard at work on the future generational issues. Thank you, George and Mokie, for your hard work.

The committee held three conference calls on the issue of birth defects and functional disabilities in the children and grandchildren of Vietnam veterans. The committee strongly believes chemical exposures to either the father or mother may cause medical problems in the offspring and future generations of all veterans, regardless of where the exposure occurred.

Birth defects include not only physical deformities but functional disabilities such as learning problems. If you know of a veteran with a child—regardless of the child’s age—with a birth defect, there is a web site where the birth defect can be registered. The information you provide to this site will help us better understand birth defects in veterans’ offspring. This web site is extremely important to the work VVA is doing on future generational issues.

Please help direct veterans who have children with birth defects to http://www.birthdefects.org/registry Soon there will be a link to it on the Agent Orange page of the VVA web site.