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J. David Erickson, DDS, PhD; Joseph Mulinare, MD, MSPH
Center for Environmental Health Centers for Disease Control Atlanta

JAMA. 1985;254(5):609-610.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.—

In our reports,^1,2 we note that there was great public concern about the risks of US Vietnam veterans in general for fathering babies with birth defects, as well as about the risks of those who may have been exposed to Agent Orange. These two concerns guided our study design. In those reports, we discuss the difficulty of ascertaining Agent Orange exposure. The estimates of exposure that can be constructed today must derive from personnel and combat records created many years ago. These records were not made for the purpose of conducting health studies, and, in particular, they contain no specific information about individual veterans' exposure to herbicides. At this time, one can attempt only to rank the relative likelihood of individual veterans' exposure, based on the time and location of service in Vietnam in relation to recorded patterns of herbicide usage.

Sterling and Arundel state that the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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