raisinbran20 asked
The Environmental Protection Agency (search) is drafting a policy to once again allow the consideration of experimental tests on humans in the setting of chemical exposure limits. It’s the right thing to do — as long as the Bush administration is prepared to defend the policy from the savage attacks that should be expected from environmental activists. Under the new policy being developed, manufacturers that want to test pesticides and other chemical products on human volunteers would submit proposals to the EPA for review. The agency would approve studies unless they are deemed unethical or significantly deficient in design. The data could then be considered by the agency in the setting of permissible levels of exposure to chemicals. The Clinton administration placed a moratorium on such voluntary human testing in 1998. Environmental activists and other Bush administration-haters will no doubt try to liken the return of voluntary human testing to past instances of criminal human experimentation — such as Nazi concentration camp experiments, the Tuskegee syphilis study (search) (in which the U.S. Public Health Service purposefully left African-American men with untreated syphilis) and the U.S. government’s secret human radiation experiments (search) (in which people were unknowingly injected with plutonium). I can even envision a twist to the 2001 television commercial produced by the Democratic National Committee in response to the Bush administration’s decision to review the Clinton administration’s eleventh hour rule concerning arsenic in drinking water. Instead of the little girl in the TV ad asking, “May I please have some more arsenic in my water, Mommy?” she might in 2005 ask, “Mommy, is it time for my pesticide pill?” Don’t fall for this nonsense. The testing of chemicals on human volunteers (search) isn’t new, has rigorous safety standards, and helps establish more evidenced-based chemical exposure limits. What’s more, opposition to voluntary
118 answers · 0 comments
Answer this yourself in the app
See how this splits by age, gender, and region in the app.
