The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee is probing the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of humans as guinea pigs to test high levels of air pollution.
Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Paul Broun (R-Ga.) asked the EPA’s inspector general, Albert Elkins, to review the human research studies conducted since 2004.
In these studies, test subjects — many of them unhealthy and elderly adults — were exposed to high levels of air pollutants such as diesel exhaust and fine particulate matter more than 20 times higher than the EPA standard.
“I am concerned about the individuals EPA asked to participate in these studies, which included unhealthy and elderly adults who, in some cases, were explicitly selected to participate because they suffered from moderate asthma and metabolic syndrome,” Broun wrote. “My concerns appear to be justified by the experiences of two study subjects who participated in EPA experiments between January 5, 2010 and June 9, 2011 when 41 human study subjects were exposed to PM2.5 levels ranging from 41.54 micrograms per cubic meter to 750.83 micrograms per cubic meter for periods of up to 2 hours.”
In October 2010, a 58-year-old test subject with a history of heart and other health problems had to be taken to the hospital because of atrial fibrillation.
Broun gave the inspector general an April 2013 deadline to explain what rules are in place, if any, regarding what human test cases can be exposed to and how the agency protects test subjects from premature death.
In a congressional hearing last year, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson compared the lethality of particulate matter to cancer.
“Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” she said. “If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country.”
Was this a formal research protocol reviewed and sanctioned by an Institutional or Regional Review Board? How were subjects recruited? Were these people properly consented? What did that document look like? Was there coercion? Was there full disclosure on the part of investigators of any potential COI’s?
Follow-up information will be most interesting!
The EPA is being sued. Nuremberg Laws may have been violated also. They were experimenting with gas chambers. Maybe this is how Bill Ayers and the Weathermen wanted to eliminate 25,000 people?
I quote: “In these studies, test subjects — many of them unhealthy and elderly adults — were exposed to high levels of air pollutants such as diesel exhaust and fine particulate matter more than 20 times higher than the EPA standard.”
What were they hoping to prove or find by exposing human beings to PM levels 20 times the EPA standard? Do PM levels that high still exist in America? Or does the LNT hypothesis also apply to particulate mater?
Lets up their budget another 25%.
Who authorized this! Lisa Jackson? This is unconscionable. This is on the order of the
“Tuskeegee Study”.This is a crime…
EPA science is suspect. They do not comply with normal scientific methods. Testing is bent toward political goals. I have heard of data that was simply erased because it did not support a predetermined desired political result, e.g. punish coal combustion. The result is a reduced trust in both government and science.
An example: The latest hateful rage is against mercury present in coal combustion. Most metals are harmful if ingested in a human being, but the smoking gun came from Japan where mercury byproducts were simply dumped in a river mouth. Mercury is eaten by microbes and their waste is methyl mercury (short name), organic mercury, which is a strong neurotoxin Scavenger fish from the sea floor, containing large amounts of methyl mercury, were consumed by pregnant women who gave birth to grossly deformed children. Aquatic methyl mercury, concentrated in the fish food chain, and consumed is the villain. However, massive government funded tests by heavy seafood consuming populations (e,g Seychelles Islands, a dozen fish meals each week) showed almost no ill effects, These results were ignored in favor of another test in the Fargoe Islands which showed slight abnormalities in child development (e.g walked a few days later). This is the basis of US policy on mercury ingestion. It devastated the tuna industry, and may shut down scores of coal fired power plants, due to bad bad mercury. (Trace mercury is found in coal.)
The false conclusions, and policies, rest on three flaws. The people in the Fargoe Islands eat whale, a different species than fish. The second fact is the mass balance of aquatic mercury from coal combustion during the industrial revolution, vs. the ignored effects of black smokers. These under sea volcanoes number in the thousands and have been ejecting mercury into sea water since plate technotics began, billions of years. The ejections dwarf all of mankind’s activities, by orders of magnitudes. Lastly, the health advantages of eating fish far outweigh the disadvantages of eating a food source which evolved in the mercury bearing sea. I once inquired why the government did not correlate black smoker mercury to coal plant mercury effects and was told,”Great Question; we are not funded to study it.”
Government science is formed by the golden rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules. The data will be tortured until it tells us what we want to hear.
It is destroying our nation.
Shocked I am! Not!!!
EPA Official: EPAs “philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of US energy producers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze3GB_b7Nuo&feature=player_embedded
Numbers:
FIFTY-SEVEN percent of U.S. power supply is generated by coal-fired plants.
ONE THIRD of the coal-fired plants will be shuttered by the Obama-EPA Directorate Collective, a wholly owned subsidiary of the wacko environmentalist movement.
What is there to replace those generation plants? Solar and Wind, yeah right!.
Dirty little secret of Solar and Wind power generation–they are both SO UNRELIABLE THAT STANDARD FUELED GENERATION PLANTS ARE KEPT POWERED UP TO PREVENT CRASHING THE ELECTRIC GRID WHEN THEY CAN’T DELIVER POWER. For those of you having received a public-school education this means that fossil-fueled plants are running as a permanent backup supply for Solar and Wind generation.
Obama is turning America into a SOCIALIST PARADISE–a third or fourth world country. We will be experiencing brownouts very soon, our power bills will likely QUADRUPLE. For those of you with a public school education that means if your power bill last month was $250.00 it will increase to $1,000.00 for the same consumption in the future.
Venezuela will have a more reliable power system than America.
Your numbers are little out of date; coal contributes about a 1/3 of our electricity today. It has dropped steadily since Obama took power and is sitting on a technical cliff. All of the coal plants are ancient, and utilities know that if they put money in them, a library of new mandatory regs will drive the costs far beyond any hope of getting their money back. Thus, many plants will be shut down. In my judgment, your estimate of a four fold increase in the light bill is too low. My guesstimated range is two to twenty, so light bills in the thousands per month are coming. So green energies will become competitive. This is victory for the greens.
But no one can pay that much. So the grid will cost too much. But green generators only work some of the time, maybe 20% in the real world.
So America will no longer have a grid (as we know it). So we will become pretty much like Venezuela. So you are correct.
But neither of us have considered what happens to a nation’s industrial and military might when this occurs. Maybe you and I are wide eyed optimists? Maybe people who think differently, will conquer us. For several reasons, I encourage all American kids to study Mandarin.
I engineered a score of nukes, two score fossil fueled power plants and spent decades assessing advanced technologies, mostly in energy and materials, some forty years of practice.
The conclusion of this study, reached BEFORE the confirmatory “experimentation,” is that modern farming is mean. This country needs to move beyond mean things like farming and ranching and on to nice things like community organizing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl-N__xMwds
What do you mean, what will people eat? What do you think food stamps are for, silly?