4/26/2005: Agent Orange victim
 

http://cellar.org/2005/xuanminh.jpg

The official caption says Xuan Minh, 3, looks out from his bed at the Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Min city on Friday March 25,2005, suffering from what is believed to be the effects of the jungle defoliant Agent Orange, used heavily in the region by the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War. Vietnam celebrates the end of hostilities on April 30, 2005, marking 30 years since war in Vietnam ended.

Good God Damn. I don't always pick the deformities for IotD, you know, sometimes one just doesn't need to see that kind of crap. Sometimes it's just too easy, because deformities are always mind-boggling. What's mind-boggling to me, though, is that somehow Agent Orange is *still* a problem. We should have cleaned this shit up long ago. It's very sad.

If it's true...

Snopes isn't sure:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/medical/orange.asp

shannon miller. 4th grade. every last hair on her body fell out. no other major health problems, but absolutely no hair growth ever again - at least until high school graduation when i last saw her.

the doctors tied that back to her father's agent orange exposure in viet nam. that was 1983-4 though. it's scary that things like this are still happening 20 years later.

Disturbing yes, particularly if the image is undoctored.

But unless the incidence of such birth defects is higher than expected in the general population, what's to say that it's not just run-of-the-mill mutation, rather than the hoped-for-because-we-can-sue-Dow-Chemical Agent Orange?

A friend's husband died of a rare cancer that was thought to be the consequence of his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. He was not provable as a direct exposure victim, I'd think it's even more unlikely to be proven 38 years later.

and other reasons monsanto is the devil.

I don't know about you, but that image looks severely fake. The resolution on the face seems different than those on the rest of the picture...

Snopes seems to think the image itself is real, looks real enough to me. It's nowhere near as bad as some of the agent orange deformaties I've seen.

this one is awful.

Might have if we'd won. Tough when you're driven out.
But how do you clean it up? Where is it? In the soil? How deep? You can't remove the soil without removing the trees. Would a thermo-nuclear device do it? Seems in 30+ years it must be in the water table by now.
How can you blame the chemical company that provides it to the military under contract? After all they were just supporting our troops, right? I doubt if the Mil Spec said anything about future children. It did however say it had to get the leaves off the trees Right Now. How many chemicals will do that?
Have to be some nasty shit to defoliate a jungle, Right Now. :vomit:

Snopes now says True, and has additional disturbing images of the lad.

I agree. That's how my badly managed photoshop attempts turn out - with a bit of distorted 'fizzle' around the modified area. The pose seems odd, too. But whether this one's true or not, there are still countless other deformities resulting from this and other chemical exposure so I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. Fascinating and sickening at the same time.

The middle shot of the other photos snopes has appears to show another child with protruding eyes (but no conehead).

They knew how nasty that shit was when they dropped it.

I'm not so sure. I've seen (pics) and heard quite a few stories of servicemen clowning around and spraying it on each other. Now someone, somewhere might have known but its realistic to assume that it was merely rushed through developement without anyone ever bothering to ask. Not an excuse, just a plausible scenario.