Dow: Our Unethical Tests Show That Nerve Poison is Safe.'Pesticide companies should not be allowed to take advantage of vulnerable populations by enticing people to serve as human laboratory rats,' said Pesticide Action Network senior scientist Margaret Reeves in a press release. Reports from accidental poisonings, worker exposures and other unintentional dosing exist, and 'EPA could incorporate a lot of that unfortunate, real-world data,' she said. The American Chemistry Council, the major chemical industry trade group and an advocate of expanded human testing, did not respond to requests for comment.Īccording to Sass, Some data on human exposures to chemicals may still be used. The rules will be opened to public comment in January of 2011, and will need court approval to finally become law. 'We expect the number of systemic toxicity studies to drop to as few as zero or one per year.' 'EPA expects its tougher new rules will decrease the number of systemic intentional dosing toxicity studies conducted for pesticides,' reads the EPA website. Extra protections are given to children and pregnant women. They extend protections from the Common Rule (a widely accepted set of medical ethics that forbid intentional-dosing studies that have no benefit) to all people involved in EPA-accepted studies. Proposed rule changes announced by the EPA on June 16are the result of negotiations that accompanied the legal battle. The NRDC, along with liberal nonprofits Pesticide Action Network and Earthjustice, filed suit in federal court. Nevertheless, the Bush-era EPA - led by Stephen Johnson, a former tobacco-industry scientist - said they'd accept data from those studies. They were misled into believing that they were participating in 'drug' trials, not pesticide experiments.' Sometimes, they weren't even told the substances being tested were pesticides. 'Yet in the experiments, test subjects swallowed insecticide tablets, sat in chambers with pesticide vapors, had pesticides applied to their skin, had pesticides shot into their eyes and noses, and were even exposed in their homes for six months at a time.'Ĭontinued Waxman and Boxer: 'The subjects were not told of the dangers of exposure to the pesticides. Their whole purpose is to kill insects and invasive plants,' wrote senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) in a 2005 report (.pdf) on the industry's tests. 'These pesticides are intentionally designed to be toxic. More importantly, the tests put people at potentially grave physical risk, with no benefit but a cash payment. The industry says such data provide a more accurate picture of chemical effects than animal studies.Ĭritics say the resulting science is worthless, with companies running tests on small, non-representative groups of people, such as healthy young men, in order to create a false impression of safety. The chemical industry, however, has long argued that the EPA should accept data from tests in which healthy volunteers are paid for exposing themselves to pesticides and other known toxins.

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