Thanks in part to an open letter/petition co-authored by ACSH and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI, a DC-based free-market think tank), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to consider data gleaned from strictly-controlled studies involving human volunteers instead of relying solely on animal testing. Excluded from this new regulation will be children and pregnant women, except for a very few observational studies that have already been completed. A new board is also to be established that will evaluate planned human studies for adherence to these new, rigid ethical guidelines.
Access to and consideration of such human data is long overdue. For years, anti-technology and anti-chemical activists have called for restrictions, regulations, and outright bans of safe and effective chemicals, including pesticides, because of high-dose animal tests. Basing public health policy primarily on high-dose testing on rodents is misguided, since these tests are not, in general, relevant to human health, for many reasons. Indeed, even the EPA now acknowledges that rats are not just small people. In a statement today defending the new rule, an EPA spokesperson actually declared: "Humans process some substances differently from animals...Animal data alone can sometimes provide an incomplete or misleading picture of a substance's safety or risk." Welcome, EPA, to the twenty-first century!
Naturally, advocates of junk science condemned the new approach to valid chemical testing. Led by their fiercest Senate supporter, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), these groups roundly attacked the EPA for daring to gather information that will actually detail human health effects from the tiny doses of chemicals to which we are typically exposed. Further, these technophobes fail to take into account the many benefits for human health and nutrition made possible by safe chemical pesticides. The superstitious fear of insecticides has, for example, allowed West Nile virus-carrying mosquitoes to proliferate in New York City since 1999. Had vigorous spraying been permitted, in defiance of environmentalists' objections, there is at least a possibility that this epidemic could have been nipped in the bud. Proper evaluation of human health data may also reveal that the huge organic food movement has no basis in science, at least in so far as it rests on fear of pesticide toxicity.
I believe that these "environmentalists" know full well that the data from human studies will show that the emperor of chemical toxicity has no clothes, that the dangers hyped by these groups have been illusory. There is nothing so sad as an agenda-driven campaign that is left with no target, as we shall soon see.
We here at ACSH thank our colleagues at CEI for co-producing the letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, which (knowing him slightly) I think helped prod him in the direction of sound science.
Gilbert Ross, M.D., is Executive and Medical Director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).
