How Low Will these Vipers Go?

Typical! One more way to screw the American consumer -- in this case children. The EPA is now inviting Industry to Mimic Practices of Discontinued CHEERS Study.

You may remember CHEERS (Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study), the EPA program that would have paid primarily poor black families $900 plus giving them a video camera to document the effects of pesticides on young children. This was done at the behest of the chemical companies and drew the wrath of Barbara Boxer and other Democrats. She threatened to block the appointment of Stephen Johnson to head the EPA, unless they canceled CHEERS.

"It flies in the face of everything we know about pesticides and kids," Boxer said. Later, she added, "Unless this project is cancelled, I will have a hard time moving forward this nomination."
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Now the EPA is encouraging companies to do what they canceled.

"The Bush Administration is setting the ethical bar so low that only the most sleazy cannot limbo under it," stated PEER Program Director Rebecca Roose. "The basic problem is this: the safeguards that apply to experiments involving development of drugs to help people are far more stringent than EPA's standards for experiments to determine how much commercial poisons harm people."

Some of the tests include:

• Paying "young male volunteers" to inhale methanol vapors at levels described as "a worst case scenario"
  
• Having asthma sufferers inhale potentially harmful ultrafine carbon particles.
• Exposing children (ages 3 to 12) to a powerful agricultural insecticide (chlorpyrifos) to test absorption in their systems through "urinary biomarker measurements"

LIMBO! How low will they go???