N APRIL 15, 1970, Dr. Jesse L. Steinfeld, the Surgeon
General of the United States, appeared before a hearing
of the Senate Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources,
and the Environment, headed by Senator Philip A. Hart,
which was investigating the potential hazard to human
health of the widely used phenoxy herbicide 2,4,5-T. He
announced a series of governmental actions aimed at limit-
ing the use of 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid around
homes, on farms, and on other areas in the United States.
On the same day, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,
David Packard, announced that the American armed forces,
which had been using 2,4,5-T in the Vietnam war, would
stop using it. The employment of the compound in aerial
defoliation operations over huge tracts of South Vietnam
for the stated purpose of denying cover to vietcong forces
but also for the unstated purpose of creating a flow of
refugees from villages controlled by the Communists into
areas controlled by the South Vietnamese government
had aroused increasing protests from biologists in this
country, who maintained that the 2,4,5-T had a potential
for causing birth defects among the offspring of Vietnamese
women exposed to it. Indeed, studies made for our govern-
ment from 1966 onward by an organization known as
Bionetics Research Laboratories, of Bethesda, Maryland,
had shown that the herbicide caused a significant number
of deformities in the unborn offspring of female mice and
rats.
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