TCDD biomonitoring and exposure to Agent Orange: still the gold standard.

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to re-evaluate the issue in light of these new publications,and our work will be presented in a series of articles andcommentaries in forthcoming issues of ESPR (see the over-view on p. 146). My conclusion is that the IOM Commit-tee's approach to exposure assessment is ill conceived, andfundamentally flawed. Serum dioxin analysis remains thegold standard, and the failure to validate the model ulti-mately endorsed by IOM should have led the IOM commit-tee to question the validity of the methodology rather thanto drop serum dioxin analysis from the project.Numerous studies relying on extensive serum dioxin testinghave established that some RANCH HAND (the Air Forceunit responsible for spraying herbicide from fixed-wing air-craft) and the US Army Chemical Corps veterans involvedin the application of Agent Orange in Vietnam had absorbeddoses of dioxin that can still be distinguished decades after-wards [5,6]. Similar studies of ground troops have not foundelevated levels of dioxin – strong evidence that these troopswere not significantly exposed to dioxin in Agent Orange[7]. The following summary of studies of biomonitoring ofdioxin levels from Agent Orange exposure, and the broaderpublic policy context, will provide an introduction to theissues to be addressed in detail in forthcoming papers.