U.S. to Reject Human Testing for Pesticides

The Clinton administration has decided to sidestep a major political and ethical quagmire by rejecting the use of human experiments in setting regulatory limits for pesticides.

Worried about a resurgence in human experiments by pesticide companies--some of which have been testing products on students and other volunteers for decades--the Environmental Protection Agency will adopt a policy of officially ignoring such studies in establishing legal limits for pesticides in food and water, agency officials said Tuesday.

The decision essentially preempts a long-awaited report by an EPA scientific panel that had been deadlocked for months over the morality of administering pesticides to people to test their safety. A draft of the report released to panel members this week concludes that certain kinds of human experiments may be acceptable and even desirable.

The prospect of even a limited EPA endorsement of human experiments had deeply troubled several scientists on the panel and outraged environmentalists and some medical ethicists.

“Studies that dose people intentionally with pesticides are scientifically and morally bankrupt,” said David Wallinga, a physician and senior scientist on the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been lobbying against the use of humans in pesticide tests. “This is a rerun of government tests in the 1950s, when we lined up soldiers in front of nuclear blasts to see what would happen.”

The EPA panel’s draft report, obtained by the Washington Post, supports limited, carefully controlled experiments to determine how pesticides are processed by the human body. But both the panel and top agency officials rejected the use of human subjects merely to establish a pesticide’s toxic threshold--the level where harmful effects are first observed.

“There is nothing in the report that will change our policy,” said Steven Galson, director of science and policy in EPA’s pesticide division.

While the EPA does not directly regulate scientific research by private companies, it traditionally relies on industry studies in establishing safe limits for pesticides. In most cases the regulations are derived from experiments on laboratory animals or on people inadvertently exposed to chemicals, such as farm workers. Several industry groups have advocated more human studies, arguing that regulations based on animal research are often excessively strict.

“The lab animal data could overstate human risk or it might understate it,” said Roger McClellan, president emeritus of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology.