What if you watched your only child grotesquely transform right before your eyes and you couldn’t stop it from happening? What if your only child was born perfectly normal and then began metamorphosing and you didn’t know what was causing it. What if your only child learned to walk, then one day couldn’t because her body had become so disfigured?

That is exactly what is happening in Danang, Vietnam. A recent scientific study has found high levels of health-threatening contamination from Agent Orange, more than 30 years after the Vietnam War ended. A site where Agent Orange was mixed during the war happens to have a lake where the locals fish and harvest lotus flowers. Eating those has caused elevated dioxin levels in the consumers.

A family residing just outside the base since 1990 regularly ate the fish from Lotus Lake for dinner. At the age of two, their daughter began manifesting grotesque health problems.

Now, at the age of seven her shinbones curve sharply and appear broken in several places, as though smashed with a hammer. Her shoulder protrudes unnaturally stretching her skin and causing her to scream in pain when getting dressed. She only has two teeth, her right eye bulges from its socket and she has sores on her face. She must slide around on her butt because she cannot walk.

Other children in the area, born with severe deformities are kept in a hospital environment called Peace Village. They appear to be missing some limbs while other limbs are twisted and grossly deformed.

I don’t know if you saw the movie “Total Recall” with Arnold Schwarzenegger several years ago, but when reading this article in the newspaper that movie came vividly to mind. There was a colony on Mars where the people lived in sort of a greenhouse type structure so they could breathe. Something there was causing grotesque defects in the citizens. They too had bulging eyes, deformed bodies, and limbs.

I wonder if the people involved in making the movie had seen these children in Danang when they created the characters in the Mars colony. The similarities are striking.

I can’t imagine the pain a mother must suffer while watching her child deteriorate. I can only assume that it may be in the same category as having a child with a terminal illness.


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Picture and information about Agent Orange from Associated Press, Friday, June 15, 2007