Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 30, 1990                   TAG: 9003300809
SECTION: MISCELLANEOUS                    PAGE: A/2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

AGENT ORANGE DISPUTE UNRESOLVED BY STUDY

The decision, announced Thursday, could make it possible for the VA to close the doors to compensation for a host of ailments linked to the herbicide used in Vietnam from 1965 to 1970 to deny jungle cover to the enemy.

Based on a study released the same day by the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, VA Secretary Edward Derwinski said he would award 100 percent disability payments to any Vietnam veteran suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Payments would be retroactive, and widows and children would receive survivors' benefits as well. More than 1,800 veterans or their survivors could receive compensation as a result, according to VA data, at a cost of $23 million the first year and about $25 million in subsequent years.

Veterans advocates were pleased with the immediate decision but remained skeptical about the study's application to the larger Agent Orange questions. The government has insisted there is no scientific proof of a link between the herbicide and a host of ailments, mostly cancers.

"When the study was designed, CDC admitted that the study population was significantly diluted with unexposed veterans, that it lacked a meaningful measure of exposure and that it lacked the statistical power to detect anything less than a 100 percent increase in certain cancers," said Sen. Thomas Daschle.

Daschle, D-S.D., is co-chairman of the Vietnam-Era Veterans in Congress Caucus and wrote legislation to make the disease and others suspected of having a link with Agent Orange exposure service-connected.

The CDC "Selected Cancers Study" looked at the occurrence of cancer in all Vietnam veterans in relation to men who did not serve in Vietnam. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma was the only cancer found in the study to have had an unusually high incidence.

Derwinski was initially very careful to say his decision was not an Agent Orange decision, but he and his aides were fuzzier in later remarks. At one point he said he made his determination based at least in part on the work of a VA-commissioned panel of outside scientists. That group reported last November that it could not find, but neither could it rule out, an association between Agent Orange exposure and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.