WASHINGTON – The news broke a few days ago in the nation’s capital, and it wasn’t good.
According to a just published medical study, the highly toxic herbicide known as “Agent Orange” left many Vietnam War combat veterans with an ailment that had’t previously been linked to the poisonous defoliant: Hypertension.
The alarming new study, reported in November by Medical Press, blames soaring rates of hypertension among Vietnam Vets on the dioxin that served as the killing agent in the widely used Agent Orange.
Somewhere between 2 and 3 million Vietnam veterans may have been exposed to dioxin over the course of the war, according to recent estimates.
Known more familiarly as “high blood pressure,” hypertension can trigger heart disease, stroke and even fatal heart attacks, if ineffectively treated in patients.
~ Douglas Volk
