Agent Orange - Agent Orange Defoliation Damage, Reduction Of Animal Habitat, Possible Human Health Threat
mixture vietnam defoliant acid
Agent Orange is a defoliant that kills plants and causes the leaves to fall off the dying plants. The name was a code devised by the United States military during the development of the chemical mixture. The name arose from the orange band that marked the containers storing the defoliant.
Agent Orange was an equal mixture of two chemicals; 2, 4–D (2,4, dichlorophenoxyl acetic acid) and 2, 4, 5–T (2, 4, 5-trichlorophenoxy acetic acid). Another compound designated TCDD (2, 3, 7, 8-tetra-chlorodibenzo-para-dioxin) is a by-product of the manufacturing process and remains as a contaminant of the Agent Orange mixture. It is this dioxin contaminant that has proven to be damaging to human health.
Agent Orange was devised in the 1940s, but became infamous during the 1960s in the Vietnam War. The dispersal of a massive amount of Agent Orange throughout the tropical jungles of Vietnam (an estimated 19 million gallons were dispersed) was intended to deprive the Viet Cong of jungle cover in which they hid.
Additional Topics
The spraying killed extensive stands of the dominant mangrove species, Rhizophora apiculata. Barren, badly eroded coastal habitat remained, which had devastating effects on the local economy. The harvesting of dead mangroves for fuel would sustain fewer people than the living forest once did, according to a 1970 report commissioned by the United States National Academy of Sciences, because the sup…
As the rich, biodiverse, tropical forests disappeared, so did habitat for indigenous animals. Uniform grassland has poor habitat diversity compared to the complex, multi-layered tropical forest. As a result, the number of bird and mammal species living in sprayed areas declined dramatically. Most of the forest animals are adapted to living in a specific habitat and are unable to survive in the pos…
Agent Orange has unquestionably been a disaster for the ecology of Vietnam. But evidence also suggests that the defoliant, and in particular the TCCD dioxin component, is a health threat to soldiers who were exposed to Agent Orange during their tour of duty in Vietnam. Tests using animals have identified TCCD as the cause of a wide variety of maladies. In the mid-1990s, the "Pointman"…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments