VA Accepts Ruling, Will Review Agent Orange Claims It Denied

The Department of Veterans Affairs said Thursday it would not appeal a federal judge’s ruling striking down regulations that restrict compensation for victims of Agent Orange and agreed to issue new guidelines that could bring payments to thousands of Vietnam veterans.

Department Secretary Edward J. Derwinski said the VA would review all previously denied claims by veterans contending that they had been harmed by exposure to Agent Orange.

The review will come after a panel of experts uses new, less stringent statistical criteria to decide whether specific diseases are assumed to have been caused by Agent Orange exposure.

More than 34,000 claims have been filed by veterans because of exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide used as a defoliant in the Vietnam War.

“It is my opinion that an appeal would not be in the best interest of the Administration or the veterans community served by this department,” Derwinski said in a letter to Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, informing him that Justice Department lawyers should drop the case.

Derwinski and other VA officials said they had no way to estimate the potential cost to the government in added benefits to veterans if the new guidelines lead to an assumption that additional diseases were caused by Agent Orange exposure.

The president of the Vietnam Veterans of America, which filed suit against the VA over its Agent Orange rules, voiced surprise at the VA’s move and said it may clear the way for awarding of compensation benefits.

“I think it does show that there’s a new Veterans Administration and a new Administration that’s taking a different view of the Agent Orange situation,” said Mary Stout, president of the 35,000-member veterans group.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ruled this week in San Francisco that the VA had used an “impermissibly demanding test” in requiring proof of a cause-and-effect relationship between exposure to Agent Orange and specific diseases.

Instead, he said, the agency should require only a finding of a statistically significant correlation or “increased risk of incidence”--a less difficult standard to meet.

The previous department regulations have had the effect of denying service-connected benefits for cancers and all other diseases except chloracne, a non-fatal skin condition, when the claim is based on exposure to Agent Orange.