NEW YORK, March 4, 2003 -- Between 1961 and 1971 U.S. military forces dispersed
over 19 million gallons of herbicidal agents, including over 12 million
gallons of Agent Orange, in the Republic of Vietnam. Millions of Vietnamese
and a large number of the 3.2 million American men and women who served
in the armed forces in Vietnam in areas defoliated by herbicides such as
Agent Orange were exposed, but the health effects still are not fully known.
Now, under contract to the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health have developed
a geographic information system (GIS) to estimate these exposures by analyzing
the relationships between herbicide spraying, geography, population, and
troop location. Researchers now have a tool to pursue epidemiologic and
environmental studies of exposed individuals, military units, and other
entities whose health might be affected by spraying activities.
Co-lead investigators of the study Jeanne M. Stellman, professor of
clinical health policy and management, and Steven D. Stellman, professor
of clinical epidemiology, both at the Mailman School, developed the powerful
GIS tool that will allow researchers to generate a quantitative measure
and, therefore, estimate and assign herbicide exposure opportunity scores
to troops, locations, and individuals -critical tools for epidemiologic
investigations of health outcomes. What this means for individuals is
that now both Vietnam veterans and residents can determine their proximity
to herbicide sprays.
With its unique user-friendly software package, called the Vietnam Herbicide
Exposure Assessment System at the Mailman School, the relational GIS
database system provides the ability to do otherwise complex exposure
model calculations with rapid, straightforward arithmetic procedures.
According to Dr. Jeanne Stellman, "In the case of exposure to herbicides
in Vietnam-which began 40 years ago and ended 30 years ago-no other reliable
measure is available for large scale epidemiologic studies. While Vietnam
was not uniformly sprayed, patterns we see are sufficient to justify
these studies on military and civilian populations as well as studies
of environmental and ecologic damage." Dr. Steven Stellman observes, "Lack
of data and exposure models no longer need to be the major impediments
they have been in the past to research the health of Vietnam veterans
and the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people."
The complete findings of the study will be published in the March issue
of Environmental Health Perspectives and summarized in the Environews
Section. You can access the article abstract online at at http://ehponline.org/orange2003/ or
at http://dx.doi.org/ via doi: 10.1289/ehp.5755.
The National Academy of Sciences, as contractors of the research, will
be issuing a report to the Veterans Administration in late March 2003
with recommendations for next steps and continuing epidemiologic research
on the effects of Agent Orange.
About the Mailman School of Public Health
The only accredited school of public health in New York City, and among
the first in the nation, Columbia University's Mailman School of
Public Health provides instruction and research opportunities to more
than 800 graduate students in pursuit of masters and doctoral degrees.
Its students and over 200 multidisciplinary faculty engage in research
and service in the city, nation, and around the world, concentrating
on biostatistics, environmental health sciences, epidemiology, health
policy and management, population and family health, and sociomedical
sciences.
EHP is the journal of the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
More information is available online at http://www.ehponline.org/.
Editor's note: A full copy of the report is available by fax or
e-mail (PDF format) to media at no charge. Go to www.ehponline.org/press,
call 919-653-2582, or e-mail media@ehp.niehs.nih.gov.
