US agency 'giving green light' to human toxin tests

The Guardian

Congressional Democrats accused the US government environment body yesterday of opening the door to tests of pesticides on humans that "appear to routinely violate ethical standards".

The Democrats issued a report saying that, since lifting a moratorium on human testing imposed by the Clinton administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had accepted for review more than 20 studies on the effects on human subjects of "highly hazardous" poisons and suspected carcinogens.

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The congressional report was sponsored by Barbara Boxer, a California senator, and Henry Waxman, a congressman from the same state. They said it had uncovered "significant and widespread deficiencies" in 22 human pesticide experiments it reviewed.

"In violation of ethical standards, the experiments appear to have inflicted harm on human subjects, failed to obtain informed consent, dismissed adverse outcomes and lacked scientific validity," the report found. "In many of the experiments, the subjects were instructed to swallow capsules of toxic pesticides with orange juice or water at breakfast."

The "informed consent" forms were often loaded with jargon, hard to understand or deliberately misleading about potential health risks. Some studies dismissed unfavourable results. In one test, all eight subjects became sick after exposure to a pesticide, but in the report their symptoms were discounted and attributed to "viral illness".