Stop Testing Pesticides On People
Overview | Fact Sheet |
Untitled Document
What’s New
The Bush administration’s EPA has issued new rules that allow the agency to use dangerous, unethical and unscientific pesticide tests conducted on humans to weaken public health laws. Despite a congressional mandate to protect vulnerable populations including children and pregnant women, the new EPA rules have loopholes large enough to fly a crop duster through. The fight now moves back to Congress where U.S. PIRG will continue working with congressional champions to decide on the best legislative strategy for putting an end to testing pesticides on people.
How You Can Help
Tell your member of Congress that you want them to protect our public health standards and put an end to human pesticide testing.
Overview
Pesticides aren’t meant for people. They’re toxic chemicals meant to kill bugs, rodents and all manner of other creatures. That’s why the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is supposed to set very strict regulations limiting our exposure to these dangerous chemicals.
But rather than play by the EPA’s rules and limit human contact with these toxic chemicals, pesticide companies constantly try to rewrite them and weaken our public health standards. So they intentionally test their products on humans to prove just how much of a toxic chemical it takes to make a person sick.
Despite the fact that these tests are unsafe, unethical and scientifically unsound, pesticide companies use them to convince regulators to let them use more and more pesticides in our foods and other household products and to justify keeping older, more dangerous pesticides on the market that would otherwise be removed by modern health regulations.
In 1998, the Clinton administration agreed that these experiments were ethically and scientifically unacceptable and banned the use of human pesticide tests in setting public health standards for pesticides. Now, at the behest of the pesticide industry, the Bush administration is on the verge of reversing this ban. The PIRGs are working to stop them. More.
