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GULFPORT (AP) - These are not new stories.

The tales of sickness, misery and death blamed by many families around the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport on Agent Orange contamination have been passed back and forth from front yards and over coffee shop countertops for decades.

"That whole neighborhood is dying over there, and it's not a quick, painless death," said 33-year-old Stephanie Ragar, who grew up playing at her grandparents' house two blocks from the base.

"I watched my mother throw up her liver in a trash can," she said.

Federal and state regulators have been tracking and trying to clean up Agent Orange pollution north of the base, first traced into neighborhood ditches and streams in 1979, for years.

Suzanne Collum, who grew up a block north of the base, can cast her eye almost in any direction on her old street and find them. On her left is a father lost to cancer whose infant daughter was diagnosed with childhood leukemia. On her right are two learning disabled children. Collum's own children suffer from recurrent reproductive problems.

"There's a lot of heart problems, liver problems, but especially kidney problems," Collum said. "We have 13 retardations in a five-block radius."

While federal agencies have tracked the pollution in the soils and water, the residents themselves say they haven't received the attention they deserve.

"They keep saying they're testing this and testing that, but when it comes to the sicknesses and diseases in our neighborhood, they're saying, 'We can't believe this is happening now from something back in the '70s,'" said Valerie Fryou.

In a report released last month, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that the principal chemical of concern in the Agent Orange - tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD - is not a public health risk.

The more difficult question, whether lives were put in jeopardy in years past, or if current illnesses may be linked to old exposures, could not be determined because of a lack of information, the report states.

Requests by residents for the agency to take blood samples in hopes of showing what, if anything, is in their bodies making them sick were turned down based on a lack of demonstrated risk.

About seven years ago, just a few years after the Seabee Base was rejected as a potential Superfund site, a federal designation given to the most polluted sites in the country, surveyors hired by the U.S. Navy walked the streets around the base to talk to residents.

What they found - story after story of failing bodies, sickness and death, mostly blamed on leaching chemical pits and Agent Orange leaks from the base - left the surveyors suffering "significant emotional stress," according to the Navy report.

"Although the surveyors were trained in how to deal with stories like these, they were surprised by the number of cancer incidents in the neighborhoods, and this was a source of significant emotional stress to several of them," the report reads.

The Mississippi Department of Health has never done a similar survey to try to determine if clusters of related illnesses exist that could be blamed on toxic exposure, according to numerous sources, The Sun Herald reported.

Even the Navy has been unimpressed with the MDH's response through the years.

The Health Department's habit of comparing county-to-county statistics, rather than walking door to door as surveyors did in 1997, is not the best way to study illness in a specific neighborhood, the Navy's 1997 report states.

"While this practice can help identify cancer clusters by statistical comparisons," the report says, "it is of less use for smaller study areas, such as the survey neighborhoods."

The scarcity of hard data maintained by the U.S. Navy has been frustrating for Gordon Crane, the base's environmental program manager who complains that records about Agent Orange predating 1982 are virtually nonexistent.

Although numerous cleanup efforts have been performed through the years both on and off the base, the Navy has identified yet another stretch of wetlands along Canal Road that still requires remediation.

Along the way, the effort being joined by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will include tests for any other hazardous substances.

These include lead and cadmium that has leached from the base's waste pits into groundwater beneath the base, Crane said.

Former dockworkers who unloaded railroad cars of Agent Orange weekly at the Port of Gulfport to be shipped off to Vietnam from 1967 to 1969 have their own horror stories.

"We poured out more stuff on the docks down there than we did in Vietnam," said Frank Ladner, who retired from the port in 1985. "Nobody's saying anything about that. All those boys that worked with me are damn near dead."

Ladner says he has suffered severe nerve damage and has had numerous joints replaced. He talks about forklifts punching holes in the drums and of black fluid spraying out, or barrels dropping from pallets being hoisted by crane onto waiting vessels.

"I've had this stuff in my eyes. I've had it all over," Ladner said.

Joe McKay, who spent about 45 years on the docks, said he recalled such spills but doesn't share Ladner's health complaints. Not familiar with the toxic nature of the liquid, workers would spray spills off into the water, both said.

"We didn't know what we were working with," Ladner said. "So help me God, we didn't know."