Young children and teenagers were used as guinea pigs in medical experiments funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, and a Washington educational foundation thinks it’s time for Congress to investigate how it happened and who was responsible.
Children as young as 10 years old had diesel exhaust sprayed directly into their noses in experiments conducted at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the website JunkScience.com. The colleges received grants from the EPA to conduct the tests.
“Not only has EPA been caught violating the letter and the spirit of virtually every national international code, law and regulation for the protection of human subjects in medical experiments developed since World War II,” said Energy & Environmental Legal Institute attorney David Schnare, “but they have done so in shocking style, abusing the most vulnerable people of all, children.”
EELI, a Right-leaning nonprofit, charged that the EPA, UCLA, USC and the researchers should be investigated by Congress and other law enforcement agencies.
“You’ve got kids who are being put at risk,” Schnare said. “Every state has statues that gives them protection.”
The tests on kids exposed participants directly to health risks, but obscured the danger on consent forms.
“Compounding the basic villainy of the experimentation itself is that the USC/UCLA researchers failed to warn parents and children how dangerous EPA and [the California Air and Resource Board] had determined diesel exhaust to be,” Schnare said. “So, there was no informed consent as required by law.”
The consent form said the exposure was “equivalent to about two days exposure to Los Angeles air,” but failed to disclose short-term effects and minimized the cancerous nature of diesel exhaust.
“The excess cancer risk from one or a few diesel exposures like the one used in this study, if any, is very small,” the consent form read.
Documents associated with the experiment, however, described the tests as exposing the children to up to 60 times greater than the amount the EPA determined to be safe.
The experiment purposely exposed the children to health risks.
“The goal of this study is to determine whether children are more susceptible to the effects of pollution and why,” the experiment read.
The EPA had previously claimed exposure to diesel exhaust fumes is life-threatening danger because of particles found in them.
“Particulate matter causes premature death,” former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress in 2011. “It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”
Also, the California Air and Resources Board determined that no level of exposure to diesel exhaust is safe and that short-term effects, such as an increase in airway resistance, exist.
In other words, the EPA either diminished the health risks to participants or exaggerated them to Congress, according to Schnare. “The agency is trying to have it both ways,” he said.
Schnare also said the experiments violated California’s version of the Nuremberg Code, ethics standards established in response to Nazi experimentation prior to and during World War II, as well as federal regulations.
“It is identical in nature to the Tuskegee experiments,” Schnare said. The tests, uncovered in 1972, studied the long-term effects of syphilis on black men without their consent.
However, because the diminished effects of the particles were excluded from the EPA-funded study, the institutional review boards that approve the ethical value of experiments allowed the tests to commence, Schnare said.
Participants received little return on their investment.
“There is no direct benefit from you performing this study except for learning how well your body can cope with pollution,” the consent form said.
Schnare added: “There’s no benefit to the subjects. All there is is risk.”
It’s not the first time EPA, the federal agency tasked with protecting “human health and the environment,” has been linked to experiments using human guinea pigs. Similar tests on the elderly and those with lung disorder were uncovered in 2012.
Laura Allen, an EPA spokesman, disputed allegations that the agency did anything improper.
“First, the studies were conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Southern California, not EPA. The studies were funded by EPA and the National Institutes of Health. EPA grantees follow strict regulations that provide protections for anyone involved in a study, including requirements for informed consent and approval of research by an Institutional Review Board. Protecting the health of study participants is the most important factor.
“Second, the studies in question did not involve exposure to diesel exhaust, but rather minute amounts of soot particles. Droplets were placed in the nose for 5 seconds and then blown out, so that no particles were inhaled or reached the lungs. The amount of particles they received approximated the amount that children living in Los Angeles would normally receive over 1-2 days.
“None of the subjects showed any adverse health consequences as a result of participating in this research, which was important in understanding how children differ from adults in producing natural chemicals (antioxidants) that protect against air pollution, and why some children develop allergies. All methods and results from these studies were peer-reviewed, published, and presented at professional conferences.”
This story has been updated to include an EPA response.
