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----- Original Message -----
From: secr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 7:34 AM
Subject: [mobilize-globally] U.S. Will Use Once-Banned Human Tests
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 01:15:49 -0700 (MST)
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [CitizensAgainstBush] U.S. Will Use Once-Banned Human Tests
>
>
> Now tell me honestly, do you think we could get Bush or Ashcroft to sign
> up as guinea pigs to take small doses of pesticides? This must be one
> of those tests that was dreamed up by Nazi scientists in favor of
> population control. A little selective extermination for dummies. The
> motto: If your dumb enough to do it, you're dumb enough to die.
>
> $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
> US Will use Once-Banned Human Tests
> Pesticides: EPA says it will accept industry data gathered by giving
> paid subjects chemical doses.
>
> By ELIZABETH SHOGREN, Times Staff Writer
> WASHINGTON -- Three years ago, in response to mounting criticism from
> environmentalists and physicians, the Clinton administration stopped
> using information from industry studies conducted on humans to determine
> the amount of pesticides that could be applied to fruits, vegetables and
> other crops.
> Now the Bush administration, siding with manufacturers on whether such
> studies are ethical and scientifically valid, has told the pesticide
> industry it will use data from such tests, in which paid volunteers
> swallow small doses of the products.
>
>
> The new policy, which the Environmental Protection Agency has not
> announced, also appears to disregard the recommendations of a scientific
> panel the agency assembled in late 1998.
> Two panel members called for a ban on human testing of pesticides, while
> the 16 others said such tests must be very limited. The panel of
> doctors, bioethicists and clinical scientists urged the EPA to adopt a
> clear policy on human testing, one that would require adherence to
> rigorous standards and pre-approval by an independent review board.
> "The force of the report was, in general, that it shouldn't be done.
> There should be a very high threshold," said panel member Samuel
> Gorovitz, a professor of philosophy and public administration at
> Syracuse University.
> The new policy could have a significant impact because it comes as the
> government is beginning to reassess about 9,000 pesticide safety levels
> to reflect their impact on children. In general, children can tolerate
> smaller amounts of pesticides, medicines and other substances than
> adults.
> Federal regulators determine the amount of certain pesticides that
> people can tolerate on foods, in water and in agricultural jobs without
> harming their health. Too much exposure can result in neurological
> damage, cancer or other serious illnesses.
> Though details of the new policy are unclear, industry officials welcome
> the shift. Without human tests, the government uses the results of
> animal testing and multiplies that exposure level by 10 to establish an
> exposure level considered safe for humans. The companies argue that
> human tests provide more accurate results, allowing pesticides to be
> applied to crops in larger quantities and closer to delivery to
> supermarkets.
> Industry Calls for Human Tests
> Without human tests, regulations "end up being more conservative and
> more restrictive than they need to be," said Ray McAllister, vice
> president for science and regulatory affairs for the pesticide trade
> association.
> If human subjects are not used, "you may be denying benefits not only to
> the grower producing the crop but also to society that needs the food at
> a reasonable price," he said. "There are secondary public health
> consequences if you don't have good crop protection."
> Industry officials also noted that human volunteers are regularly used
> to test the effects of air pollution.
> The administration first signaled the policy switch last month, when a
> top EPA official told the annual meeting of the American Crop Protection
> Assn. that the agency would consider the results of clinical tests on
> humans.
> Assistant Administrator Stephen L. Johnson "indicated the agency would
> be looking at the human data that were submitted," McAllister said.
> Also, documents on at least three pesticides submitted to the EPA in
> recent weeks for re-registration plainly state that the agency is
> considering data from tests on humans. The re-registration is mandated
> by the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act, which requires the EPA to
> reassess 9,000 currently registered pesticides for their impact on
> children.
> An EPA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed
> Johnson's remarks to the trade group, and other EPA officials
> acknowledged that the administration is developing a new policy on human
> testing of pesticides. But officials said they did not have approval
> from top political appointees to talk about it.
> In its 10-month tenure, the Bush administration has weakened an array of
> Clinton administration environmental regulations and proposals, agreeing
> with industry and angering environmentalists. The rollbacks range from
> loosening energy efficiency standards for air conditioners to erasing a
> provision that would have allowed federal land managers to reject
> certain types of mines if they would cause irreparable damage to public
> land.
> The administration also halted the implementation of new, stricter
> standards for arsenic in drinking water. After conducting its own tests,
> and under pressure from Congress, the EPA announced last month that it
> would adopt the Clinton administration standard.
> In the decade before 1996, when the law requiring retesting of
> pesticides was passed, the EPA received only a handful of human tests.
> In the three years that followed, the agency received 14 new,
> unsolicited human subject studies on 10 pesticides.
> The controversy over human testing of pesticides erupted in 1998, when
> Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based investigative
> environmental organization, published a report on the plethora of human
> test results arriving at the EPA for pesticide evaluations.
> Then-EPA Administrator Carol Browner harshly criticized the practice,
> launched the study and temporarily halted the use of such data. The
> moratorium deterred companies from sponsoring and submitting results
> from such tests. But because the Clinton administration never formalized
> the policy, Bush administration regulators could change their practices
> without a new formal policy.
> The majority of human studies considered by the EPA in the past were
> conducted in other countries. But in 1999, 60 volunteers in Nebraska
> participated in a test of a pesticide called chlorpyrifos, which is
> marketed as Lorsban or Dursban. It has been used for 30 years to keep
> insects off most major crops grown in the United States.
> The volunteers were paid $460. Some of them swallowed chlorpyrifos-laced
> tablets, while others took placebos. Some members of both groups
> experienced headaches or vomiting. Garry Hamlin, spokesman for
> chlorpyrifos manufacturer Dow AgroSciences, said the results of his
> company's tests showed no signs of toxicity from the pesticide.
> "The clinical test was a way of bridging the gap from a considerable
> amount of existing data that would help us understand how this product
> functioned in the human body, how the body metabolized it and how
> quickly it excreted it," he said.
> But the EPA panel of scientists found that human testing is almost never
> needed for pesticides already in use because studies are already
> available of agriculture workers and fruit and vegetable eaters who have
> been exposed to the pesticides.
> The panel suggested that at least some human subject tests used by the
> EPA in the past had not met the demands of good science, saying that
> "bad science is always unethical." Panel members were concerned, for
> example, that previous human tests were too small to assess the risks of
> pesticide exposure to the broader population or to more vulnerable
> individuals.
> Human testing of pesticides cannot be justified "to facilitate the
> interests of industry or of agriculture," the panel concluded in its
> final report, delivered in February 2000. Such studies are acceptable
> only if they "promise reasonable health benefits to the individual or
> society at large," it said.
> Concerns About Tests' Prevalence
> Human studies could be appropriate for new pesticides, the panel
> concluded, if there was no way to protect human health by testing on
> rats, dogs and other laboratory animals.
> Panel members were concerned that human testing of pesticides could
> become widespread, especially because the 1996 law required the EPA to
> give closer scrutiny to pesticides originally registered before 1984.
> Recent documents regarding the pesticides phosmet, azinphos-methyl and
> chlorpyrifos--insecticides used on a wide variety of fruits and
> vegetables--show that the EPA is evaluating data from human tests as
> well as a variety of tests on laboratory animals to determine exposure
> levels.
> Pesticide manufacturers want to use human tests to reduce or eliminate
> regulators' current assessment method: determining safe exposure levels
> for laboratory animals and then multiplying that risk factor by 10 to
> ensure safety for humans.
> In the midst of the dispute over federal policy, California's Department
> of Pesticide Regulation drafted its own policy on human testing. The
> state agency considers human test data if the tests were conducted under
> specific ethical and scientific guidelines.
> The state agency has considered two or three human-subject tests over
> the last five years, according to Glenn Brank, spokesman for
> California's Department of Pesticide Regulation. One such test, for the
> azinphos-methyl, persuaded regulators that humans and animals respond in
> the same way to the toxins in the pesticide.
> As a result, the agency allowed growers of apricots and other pitted
> fruits to apply the pesticide closer to harvest time, Brank said.
> Lynn Goldman, who headed the pesticide program at EPA for five years
> during the Clinton administration, opposes the use of human subject
> tests and strongly believes that EPA can safely regulate pesticides with
> tests on animals.
> She said she is "very troubled" by the use of human testing for
> pesticides, because there is no possible healthful effect from taking a
> pesticide-laced tablet, as there usually is for testing a
> pharmaceutical. The only justification for conducting the tests is to
> make more money for the pharmaceutical companies, she said.
> "If they were doing something to benefit us you might look at it
> differently," said Goldman, now a professor of environmental sciences at
> Johns Hopkins University. "For industry, there is an enormous amount of
> money in the balance; one study could make the difference of tens of
> millions of dollars. That's one of the troubling ethical issues."
> Goldman also finds it disturbing that test subjects are given money to
> take the pesticide tablets, saying that encourages students and
> low-income individuals to participate.
> Goldman said she believed that pressure from the industry prevented the
> Clinton administration from finalizing a policy governing human testing.
> "When it came to new regulations or new policies like this one--and
> especially around the Food Quality Protection Act that had such a major
> impact on the world--we had a whole lot of push-back through the White
> House from industry, and a lot of it would come at us from Congress,"
> she said.
> For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com
>
> Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
> By visiting this site, you are agreeing to our Terms of Service.
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> Why we must protect the Constitution:
> "Then they came for the terrorists and I did not speak
> up because I was not a terrorist."
>
>
> ----------
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-112701tests.story
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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