Health expert on visit

Press, 9 May 1983, Page 9

Health expert on visit

Agent Orange is unlikely to cause cancer in New Zealand veterans of the Vietnam War, according to a visiting military health expert. The Director-General of Army Health Services for Australia, Major-General W. B. James, said in Christchurch yesterday that no good evidence had been presented to support claims that exposure to the chemical undermined health. He said that he saw no great drama in the issue and that even if Agent Orange was proved to be a carcinogen, Australian and New Zealand troops had had very limited contact with it. General James, at Burnham Military Camp to celebrate the seventy-fifth anni-

versary of the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps, became interested in

medicine as a patient. He lost both legs while serving as a platoon commander in Korea and spent 14 months in hospital recovering. He was awarded the Military Cross for his efforts in the field and returned to duty as an armoured officer but left after four' years. With the help of a former serviceman’s loan, he began studying medicine. “I wanted to do something that I did not feel handicapped at,” he said. He did not intend to rejoin the Army, but was persuaded to do so by a non-commissioned officer he met at a football match—and 20 years later he is still in the Army. In 1969, General James was promoted lieutenant-

colonel and awarded the M.B.E. and in 1982 he was promoted to his present post. He said that preventive medicine was his primary area of concern and that the Australian Army was in better physical shape now than it had ever been because the troops were more alert to the need for fitness. Asked if the Falklands war had pointed up gaps in training or mistakes in strategy, General James said that the main lesson learned had been that nothing was new. Medically it had proved the need for “generalists” in the battlefield, “highly trained people who can do a variety of jobs in the early phases of injury.”