PESTICIDE COMPANIES POISON PEOPLE FOR PROFIT

[Susan Snow <sksnow@worldnet.att.net>]

Pesticide companies really do poison people for profit!  In case you do
not know this already, the Environmental Working Group has released an
important new document. Click onto the URL below to access the PDF file
of the document.
Bunny Snow
==============================================

http://www.ewg.org/pub/home/reports/english/englishpr.html
Regulatory Problems in America?  Dose Up Some Brits

Pesticide Companies Using Humans in Lab Studies

A New Strategy to Gain U.S. Approval for Insecticides

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
July 27, 1998 10:00 a.m.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Melissa Haynes, EWG,
202-667-6982

    Download "The English
    Patients" (165K)

Washington, D.C., July 27 -- For decades, U.S. and foreign pesticide
manufacturers have been feeding their products to rats, rabbits, mice,
and guinea pigs in thousands of controlled laboratory studies, all
designed to satisfy government regulatory  requirements for chemicals
that kill weeds, insects, rodents and other pests.

Studies on lab animals are still routinely conducted for pesticides
today. But in recent years, in a growing number of experiments that are
raising ethical and scientific questions inside and outside government,
the test animals are people.

And for reasons neither U.S. nor British environmental officials can
explain, most of the recent human pesticide experiments are being
performed in England and Scotland. Four have been submitted to the U.S.
Evironmental Protection Agency (EPA) since 1992, and EPA regulators
believe that more are underway in the U.K.

Just last year, Amvac Chemical Corporation, a California pesticide
company, hired a lab in England to conduct three related feeding trials
using people to test the toxicity of a bug killer, dichlorvos, a common
ingredient in pet collars and pest strips. Also, paid volunteer subjects
drank doses of the extremely toxic insecticide aldicarb in a 1992 study
in Scotland commissioned by Rhone-Poulenc, the French chemical giant.

Neither EPA nor UK pesticide guidelines require human studies. EPA
officials informally discourage such studies on ethical and scientific
grounds, refusing even to review study methods eforehand. EPA, in fact,
has no policies or oversight system in place to insure that humans
involved in such experiments are protected.

But the agency is nonetheless accepting human experimental studies
submitted by pesticide companies, several of which have been used in at
least two recent cases to soften EPA regulatory decisions.

The growing use of human testing to solve U.S. regulatory problems was
revealed in a new report from the Environmental Working Group, entitled
"The English Patients: Human Experiments and Pesticide Policy."

In effect, by substituting people for lab rats, pesticide companies have
been able to increase the amounts of pesticide that legally could be
used on crops, or be detected on foods, in water, or in air. That is why
more studies are underway in the U.K., according to EPA scientists,
though they do not know how many, where they are being conducted, or for
what pesticides.

"Pesticide companies have a huge financial incentive to test people
instead of other animals. They know that U.S. regulations on
pesticides are finally being tightened. Human tests enable chemical
companies to eliminate safety factors that have long been    applied
when nonhuman animals are used for testing," said EWG president Ken
Cook, the report's author. "Some companies have decided to relieve
regulatory pressure on their bug killers in the United States by dosing
up human subjects in the United Kingdom," Cook said.

"We know from recent experience in medical research that human
experimental subjects often do not really understand the implications of
their decision to participate and that the oversight system is
inadequate," Cook added, referring to a number of studies over the past
few years by government inspectors in the United States.

"These pesticide experiments are being conducted on humans abroad, then
accepted by the U.S. government in the absence of specific EPA
regulations or monitoring capacity for human research. These companies
are not testing medicines on people to see if they are therapeutic.
They're testing toxic chemicals to see how high exposure can be without
causing regulatory problems. No one ever benefits from being exposed to
pesticides, " Cook said.

Citing ethical and scientific concerns, EWG said it strongly opposes
human experiments that deliberately expose people to pesticides or other
environmental toxins for the purpose of determining "safe" or
"acceptable" levels of pollution for people.

"Allowing human experiments, such as those conducted recently in the
United Kingdom, to serve as the basis for registering pesticides, is
ethically indefensible," Cook said.

"Poor science involving humans is itself unethical," he noted. "We
question whether short-term feeding studies, conducted on a handful of
healthy adults, can form the basis of any assurance that pesticides are
safe for tens of millions of infants and children, as U.S. law now
requires," Cook added.

EWG is asking EPA to conduct a comprehensive study of the use of human
subjects in past and recent environmental research, modeled after the
landmark 1995 Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments. Once the study is completed, EWG says, the EPA should issue
policy and guidelines for public comment on the use of humans in
environmental research. The rules must provide for thorough monitoring,
EWG said, including consideration of special ethical considerations that
distinguish human research on toxic contaminants from human research for
drugs and medicines.

EWG also recommended an immediate moratorium on human experimentation,
of the type conducted for dichlorvos, aldicarb, and perhaps other
pesticides, for purposes of pesticide regulation. The group also asked
EPA to suspend any pesticide approvals if the agency is unable
affirmatively to determine that the studies were conducted according to
U.S. ethical standards.

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