By Grant Holloway, CNN Sydney
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PERTH, Western Australia (CNN) -- Agricultural workers in Australia's remote Kimberley region may have been exposed to potentially deadly levels of weed-killing chemicals, an independent review has found.
The workers, many of them unskilled or semi-skilled Aboriginals, used a spray known as "245T" over a 10-year period to control weeds while working for the State Government's Agricultural Protection Board (APB).
Anecdotal evidence of abnormally high levels of illness, cancers and early death among the workers led to suspicions the spraying may have been the cause.
At least 20 of the 180 workers involved in the spraying program -- which ran between 1975 and 1985 -- are now dead while many others have chronic conditions.
In particular, there have been suggestions the 245T spray used by the Kimberley workers could have been from a batch of highly concentrated chemicals that was imported illegally into Australia at the end of the Vietnam war.
It is believed the chemicals originally were to be used to manufacture the controversial defoliant Agent Orange for use in Vietnam. But the chemicals had been exposed to extreme heat which concentrated their dioxin levels to more than 200 times the safe limit for human use.
The review, which was commissioned by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture, said it could not rule out that Kimberley workers were exposed to unregulated levels of dioxin when using the spray.
But it did not draw a link between the weed killer used by the APB and the suspected illegal batches.
It said safety and work practices used at the time of the spraying were inadequate, even by the lower safety standards of the time.
It also said illnesses did develop among workers using the spray but these illnesses did not tend to be diagnosed as chemically-related by doctors treating the workers at the time.
Medical care
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Many of the surviving workers from the spraying program describe using an unlabelled sticky black chemical which could have been heat-affected 245T.
The Western Australian government, in response to the review findings, said Thursday there was still no definitive evidence contaminated batches of 245T had been used in the Kimberley program, or elsewhere in the State.
The government said it would set up a panel of medical experts and other "appropriate" persons to evaluate the finding that the workers had been exposed to abnormal health risks.
WA Agriculture Minister Kim Chance said Thursday his government would medically care for some of the people involved in the spraying program.
"It is the government's responsibility for the health of those people who have been in that program," Chance told the WA parliament.
The issue of the illegal chemicals was raised back in the early 1980s by two academics from the Australian National University in Canberra.
The two men gave evidence to a Senate inquiry saying an Agent Orange hybrid had been imported into Australia.
Buried barrels
Besides possibly being used for weed control in Western Australia, it is suspected the vast proportion of the illegal chemicals were used on cotton crops and forestry projects in rural Queensland.
The origin of the deadly 245T chemicals used in Australia has not been determined, nor have any suspected stockpiles been found.
Media reports from earlier this year say more than 1,000 drums of the illegal 245T are buried in the Perth suburb of Kwinana, but so far government investigations have found no trace of the chemicals.
Thousands of drums of the chemicals were supposedly imported in 1975 via Singapore and were misleadingly labelled to disguise their true nature.
Others think the poison could have been manufactured locally at the Homebush industrial area in Sydney -- an area which was partially rehabilitated in the 1990s to become the site for the 2000 Olympic Games.
Environmentalists fear the buried chemicals could be leaking into groundwater supplies, creating a potential disaster.
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