Re: PESTICIDE COMPANIES POISON PEOPLE FOR PROFIT

[Sandra Marquardt <smarquardt@igc.apc.org>]

At 12:35 PM 7/27/98 -0400, Susan Snow wrote:
>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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