The VA estimates that as many as 2.8 million Vietnam veterans could have been exposed to Agent Orange while
between 2.1 and 4.5 million Vietnamese civilians may have been affected by exposure.
The United States military sprayed nearly 12,000 square miles of Vietnamese jungles with the chemical defoliant over a 10-year period in an effort to clear large areas of jungle.
www.military.com
The United States sprayed 19.5 million gallons of Agent Orange over the course of the Vietnam War. The goal was to deny Vietcong fighters and North Vietnamese troops forest cover and food supplies. “The Vietnam Red Cross estimates that three million Vietnamese have been affected by dioxin, including at least 150,000 children born after the war with serious birth defects,” said Wells-Dang, referring to the toxic chemical in Agent Orange. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers were also exposed.
Nearly half a century since the end of the Vietnam War, there remains an urgent need for the United States and Vietnam to address the harmful legacy of Agent Orange, a defoliant sprayed by the U.S. military over parts of southern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — an area about the size of...
www.usip.org
This study found that the legacy of wartime Agent Orange application continues to this day, with ongoing adverse effects on the current lives of Vietnamese people more than 30 years after the end of the war. Our estimates suggest that such adverse effects are experienced mostly by females: a female living in an area that was subject to high-intensity Agent Orange application is more likely to report a serious disability in hearing, mobility, or memory than her counterpart living in an area without Agent Orange exposure.