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Summary
Pages 1-10

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From page 1...
... . After becom­ng aware that some of the aircraft on which they had worked had i previously served this purpose, some of these AF Reservists applied to the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
From page 2...
... and dioxin-like compounds (the toxic con taminants of some of the herbicides sprayed in Vietnam) , assess whether the magnitude of exposure supported by the existing information could plausibly be associated with adverse health effects during the time period when the AF Reservists were potentially exposed.
From page 3...
... For instance, considerable effort has failed to establish exactly how many C-123s the military had in Vietnam; how many of them for spraying insecticides; how many were used for spraying herbicides (the ones referred to in this report as ORH C-123s) , how many were returned to the United States, how many ORH C-123s and how many C-123s that had not been in Vietnam were allocated to the various reserve units; and how many AF Reservists possibly worked in ORH C-123s.
From page 4...
... There also is uncertainty about the fraction of the C-123s worked in by the AF Reservists that had actually been used to spray herbicides in ORH, in addition to very incomplete knowledge of the AF Reservists' profiles of work that would be needed to estimate the contact rate, frequency, and time in quantitative modeling.
From page 5...
... It noted that those from in the military or associated with the VA tended to minimize the possibility of an increased risk of exposure and adverse health outcomes among the AF Reservists. A recurrent theme in these assertions was that dry AO residues containing TCDD detected on interior surfaces of ORH C-123s long after the planes returned from Vietnam could not have moved from the surfaces and thus were unable to complete transfer to the "outer boundary of a human" to constitute exposure as defined by the US Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.
From page 6...
... When making such comparisons, the committee was contrasting the range of values it had adopted as being realistic for ­ the AF Reservists for the variables in the models (such as frequency and dura­ ion t of exposure in the contaminated environment, contact with surfaces, and breathing rates) to the extreme values assumed for the office worker population for which the guidelines had been developed (for example, 30 or 40 years working in a contaminated office)
From page 7...
... would mean that the measured TCDD surface levels would in all likelihood understate the risk of adverse health effects to which the AF Reservists actually had been exposed. Because these individually uncertain perspectives on the situation consistently supported the possibility of health risks, the committee concluded that the available information supports the expectation that the health of some of the personnel was adversely affected by their service in the C-123s that had earlier been used to spray herbicides in Vietnam.
From page 8...
... Without adjustment for reductions in the contamination over time, esti mates of TCDD exposures to the AF Reservists based on samples taken from the C-123s in the mid-1990s and in 2009 could therefore under­ estimate their actual exposures, quite possibly markedly. Therefore, the measurements resulting from interior surface sampling in 1994, 1995, and 2009 probably represent a lower bound on what average surface TCDD contamination might have been when AF Reservists worked in the planes.
From page 9...
... fall in or above the 1-to25 ng/m2 range specified as meriting cautionary consideration by international exposure guidelines. Efforts to recover the work records of the AF Reservists have been un­ success­ ul.


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