The medical detectives at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control have a well-earned reputation for relentlessly tracking down the causes of such mysterious ailments as Legionnaires' disease. But the agency's record is in danger of being blemished by a bitter controversy over Agent Orange, a defoliant containing dioxin, a suspected carcinogen.
Critics charge that the agency and one of its senior officials, Dr. Vernon Houk, helped scuttle a $63 million study that might have determined once and for all whether U.S. troops exposed to Agent Orange suffered serious damage to their health. Houk maintains he recommended that the study be canceled on strictly scientific grounds. Yet there is evidence that the CDC suppressed reports from the National Academy of Sciences that directly challenged its position, and spurned extensive help from the Pentagon, leading the White House to kill the study.
Agent Orange was widely used in Vietnam to strip the thick jungle canopy that helped conceal enemy forces; only later did scientists become aware of the potentially dangerous long-term effects of dioxin, which has produced cancers in animals. The defoliant has been suspect ever since unknown numbers of Vietnam veterans developed various cancers or fathered seriously handicapped children. Based on the inability to prove a conclusive link between those ailments and Agent Orange, the Reagan and Bush administrations refused to compensate veterans for all but a few of these health problems. But critics charge that no clear connections have been established because no serious large-scale study of exposed veterans has been done.
The most forceful complaints about the CDC have been leveled by former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. As the Navy's top commander in Vietnam, he ordered that Agent Orange be sprayed in the Mekong Delta region to destroy vegetation from which the Vietcong regularly launched ambushes against U.S. patrol boats. In 1988 Zumwalt's son Elmo III, a former lieutenant who had served in the "brown-water Navy," died from a rare lymphoma. Zumwalt believes his son's exposure to Agent Orange was responsible.
Last month Zumwalt told a House subcommittee that the CDC's work on Agent Orange had been "a fraud." He singled out Houk for having "made it his mission to manipulate and prevent the true facts from being determined." New York Congressman Ted Weiss, chairman of the panel, charged in an interview that the CDC appeared to have "rigged" its investigation to support its view that a large study of exposed veterans was not feasible.
Congress authorized the CDC study in 1982 after receiving thousands of complaints from Vietnam vets about Agent Orange. Houk, director of the agency's Center for Environmental Health and Injury Control, was placed in charge. At the White House, a science panel of the Agent Orange Working Group supervised the CDC's investigation. The Pentagon assigned its Environmental Support Group to provide the CDC with Agent Orange spraying records and those of the deployment of soldiers who may have been exposed.