A federal lawsuit filed last Friday makes shocking allegations that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency engaged in human experimentation that violated its own scientific and ethical standards — not to mention federal law and the Nuremberg Code.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, accuses the EPA of paying 41 study participants (some elderly or suffering from asthma, hypertension or metabolic syndrome) $12 an hour to breathe concentrated diesel exhaust piped in directly from an idling truck parked outside EPA’s facility in Chapel Hill, N.C., for up to two hours during a series of experiments dating back to 2004. The human guinea pigs included an obese 58-year-old woman who had to be hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat before the experiment was over and an asthmatic student then attending the University of North Carolina.
