These children are Real! Their Agent Orange Deformities are REAL as well. [View All]

[leftchick]

Someone here at DU the other day tried to suggest the photos of the "bug-eyed" boy below were fake. Sadly they are not. It is one of the thousands of horrific stories that show the US war crimes in Viet Nam...


http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-02/05/content_303315.htm


Agent Orange, children and the Viet Nam War



Two boys's eyes open wide in at the Peace Village at Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City February 3, 2004.



Hoa (R) and Nhon, both born with stunted limbs and 12 fingers, stand at their front door at their home in Dong Ha, north of Hue in central Viet Nam, February 4, 2004. Three Vietnamese who say they or their families became ill from Agent Orange defoliant used by the United States in the war nearly 30 years ago have filed the first lawsuit against makers of the product, a victims group said.



A Vietnamese girl with no arms reads using her feet to hold a book at the Peace Village in Tu Du hospital February 3, 2004. The hospital's chef de service Doctor Ng Thi Phuong Tan suspects many of the children are deformed in the womb due to exposure to Agent Orange. Two-thirds of the children at the Peace Village are from areas that were heavily sprayed by the highly toxic defoilant during the Viet Nam War.



A girl born without eyes sits in a cot at the Peace Village at Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City February 3, 2004.

on edit: Article to explain photos...
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/624/624p18.htm

~snip~

Deformities
Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong is the director of Tu Du Hospital, the major gynaecological and maternity hospital for Ho Chi Minh City and 32 provinces in the south.

Last year, the hospital performed 44,000 deliveries. About two babies a day are born malformed. Many of them do not survive very long after birth. Dr Phuong says the hospital staff usually do not tell the parents the real reason for the baby’s death; they simply say that the baby was “too weak”. They fear that if they tell the truth, husbands will abandon wives who they think are contaminated by dioxin.

Dr Phuong is careful to be balanced in her presentation. Since problem pregnancies are more likely to end up at the hospital, she says, Tu Du’s numbers should not be regarded as representative of the whole of southern Vietnam.

But try explaining statistics to the mother of one baby boy born the night before our visit, who was born with no eyes.

The war ended in 1975, but the effects continue, and no-one knows for how long. Ironically, this baby’s mother was born in that year. Her parents lived in an area sprayed with Agent Orange but seemed to suffer no ill effects. She herself has no known genetic problems, and her first child was normal