Ethical to Test Pesticides on Humans?

Throughout his tenure in the White House, President Bush has yielded to the whims of corporate donors over the views of scientists and public health experts. In perhaps the most hypocritical example of this practice, the Bush Administration is allowing the pesticide industry to test its products on our families, including vulnerable populations, pregnant women, and children. This practice needs to end. Humans – especially pregnant women and children – should not be testing grounds for efforts by the pesticide industry to relax regulations designed to protect public health.

This troubling situation became public recently when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offered low-income families in Tallahassee, Florida, more than $900 to continue to expose their children to high levels of pesticides. If that was not offensive enough, documents provided to me detail draft regulations the Bush Administration is developing which would legitimize the actual dosing of children and pregnant women with pesticides as an ethical practice. These draft regulations fail to establish a national review panel to prevent abusive experiments, lack protections for children and include multiple loopholes which undermine its effectiveness. Even officials within EPA have raised grave concerns over these draft regulations, claiming the Administration’s draft “falls far short of the stated goal to strengthen protections for individuals who participate as test subjects in human research” and may actually “greatly weaken existing protections.”

I offered an amendment to stop this practice because I believe the EPA should not be allowed to use children and pregnant women as guinea pigs. Not a single member of the United States House of Representatives opposed this amendment. Similar language was offered by Senator Barbara Boxer of California and passed in the U.S. Senate with 60 votes. But the fight continues because the 37 Senators who voted against the Boxer Amendment are supporting efforts by Senator Conrad Burns of Montana to require the EPA to implement the very same outrageous draft regulations which put at risk the health of our most vulnerable populations. Has our nation gone so far astray that it will allow Members of Congress – put in office to serve and protect – to defend the unethical and immoral practice of testing pesticides on humans?

The pesticide industry argues that the testing of pesticides on humans is actually meant to improve mosquito repellents and make better swimming pool disinfectants. But this is a red herring. The EPA is currently reviewing more than 20 such studies which have an insidious purpose and cannot be defended. In one study, college students in San Diego who were paid $15 an hour to participate were not informed that the pesticide they were inhaling was a suspected neurotoxicant and a World War II nerve gas. In these studies, men, women, or children swallowed insecticide tablets, had pesticides sprayed in their eyes or shot up their noses, or sat in chambers exposed to pesticides. It is studies like these which prove the pesticide industry is more concerned about designing outcomes which can be used to weaken regulations put in place by the Food Quality Protection Act in 1996 than about protecting public health. In the meantime, the Administration is ignoring the concerns of religious groups, scientists and public health experts who oppose these practices and defending the pesticide industry’s practices.

If we really want to protect public health, then Congress will send the President a bill to fund the EPA which retains the Solis-Bishop and Boxer “time-outs” on the testing of pesticides on humans, not one which allows pesticides to be tested on pregnant women and babies. These tests are immoral and unethical, and need to be stopped to protect all of our health.