Affected veterans struggled through three decades of insulting legal shenanigans by the manufacturers and governmental agencies before Congress recognized their plight. Denying the irreparable health consequences for decades the government finally in 1991 recognized a list of aliments that would qualify for compensation. Skin cancer was not among them.
This new study was led by Dr. Mark Clemens of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and it analyzed medical records from the Veterans Affairs Hospital of Washington, D.C. The findings suggest that veterans exposed to Agent Orange, and the contaminant dioxin, have twice the rate of suffering invasive skin cancers. These cancers include basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. So far no evidence of increased prevalence of melanoma has been proven.
The risk of skin cancer jumped to 73 percent to those veterans who actively sprayed Agent Orange. Not surprisingly, lighter skin types and those with lighter eyes demonstrated greater statistical risk. There exists a dreaded dioxin-spawned skin condition called chloracne; and these afflicted veterans show an 80 percent incident of invasive skin cancer in the study.
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