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July 9, 2001
ROCKEFELLER COMMENDS NEW TYPE 2 DIABETES BENEFITS FOR VIETNAM VETERANS
New Rules Allow Veterans to Seek Benefits Beginning Today
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) announced that today rules to compensate Vietnam veterans who suffer from Type 2 diabetes will officially go into effect. Rockefeller hailed the new rules, originally published in May, as "another small but crucial step in acknowledging the health consequences that veterans continue to suffer long after their service in Vietnam ended."
The final rules will allow the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) to provide disability benefits to Vietnam veterans who suffer from Type 2 diabetes (also known as adult-onset or non-insulin-dependent diabetes).
"We must strive to understand the long-term effects of battlefield exposures for the men and women who served this country. More than 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War, researchers are uncovering new connections between chronic diseases and exposure to herbicides such as Agent Orange," Rockefeller said. "These rules require VA to acknowledge these connections and to compensate veterans for some of their effects."
Senator Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Committee for Veterans’ Affairs, had urged the VA to add Type 2 diabetes to the list of presumptive, service connected diseases following an October 2000 report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS report found "limited/suggestive evidence of an association between exposure to the herbicides used in Vietnam or the contaminant dioxin and Type 2 diabetes."
Eligible Vietnam veterans affected by the new rules can now file claims for disability compensation, with benefits depending on the severity of their illnesses.
Senator Rockefeller has also authored legislation, S.1091, to remove the restriction preventing Vietnam veterans with respiratory cancers from claiming benefits if the disease manifested more than 30 years after exposure in Vietnam.
Other diseases similarly associated with Agent Orange exposure, such as respiratory cancers, prostate cancer, and the birth defect spina bifida in children of Vietnam veterans, are also compensated by the VA as service connected.
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