“Forever Chemicals”, continued used of herbicides, pesticides and fungicides and a recent focus on the possibility of Paraquat, a potent herbicide having a significant association with Parkinson’s Disease are making headlines. Litigation is underway and the product makers verses aggrieved citizens who associate medical syndromes with toxic exposures will play out in courts at all levels across the country.

“Public Health Politics and Agent Orange” is a three-year investigation of a wartime contaminated herbicide written in the 80’s about events in the 60’s and about to be reprised for another decade searching for the Holy Grail in science: causality, not coincidence or correlation.

Author John Hopkins studied and wrote about Agent Orange for a dissertation that finished his program for the Doctor of Public Health degree at the University of Pittsburgh.

The revised and edited edition available on this website is a field guide of sorts to the risk hazard assessments and controversial blame and shame and compensation and retribution merry go round underway in state and federal courts.

Environmental science students, lawyers, politicians and concerned people will use PHP&AO to understand the risks and potential catastrophic harms from several technologies that have crossed the line past coincidence and are producing notable correlations between exposures and delayed health harms.

The leap from correlation to causality will be framed by opposing armies of corporate legal and manufacturing teams against injury law firms and class action groups. Agent Orange was never resolved or settled in purely scientific terms. Paraquat, glyphosate (Roundup) and genetically-modified organisms (GMO’s) are in the crosshairs.