Lawmakers join suit seeking end to pesticide testing on children

Media release

October 12, 2006

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A major environmental organization’s legal effort to stop pesticide testing on pregnant women and infants received a boost yesterday when two U.S. senators and a congresswoman joined its lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Sens. Bill Nelson and Barbara Boxer, along with U.S. Rep Hilda Solis, joined the suit by the Natural Resources Defense Council seeking to toughen the Bush administration's new rule on pesticide testing. The lawmakers contend the EPA rule fails to enforce a law Congress passed last year to protect vulnerable people from harmful pesticide testing.

In court documents filed late Wednesday, the three lawmakers say the rule “fails to implement the ban required by Congress.” They say the rule only prohibits the use of data collected from pesticide testing on pregnant women and children, but not the testing itself.

“Pregnant women, infants and children have been, and likely still will be, used as human guinea pigs in pesticide testing,” Nelson said today. “It must be stopped.”

In July 2005, Nelson, Boxer and others won congressional passage of a law that put a one-year moratorium on testing pesticides on humans, while giving the EPA six months to create a rule that would prevent future testing on pregnant women, infants and children.

The law came after the Bush administration had lifted a ban on such testing; and, following disclosures that the chemical industry had largely funded an EPA study in Jacksonville, Florida in which health officials paid low-income families to unwittingly expose their young children to certain household pesticides.

The officials asked 60 Jacksonville-area families with infants or children from 9-to 12-months old to volunteer for exposure to regular pesticide spraying in their homes. In exchange, the subjects were to be paid $970. It was later discovered that the American Chemistry Council partially funded the government study with $2 million.

The EPA’s new rule prohibits certain pesticide testing. But, the three lawmakers contend, it has big loopholes allowing for wide latitude in testing on human subjects. For example, the rule allows pesticide testing on humans with the consent of “a legally authorized representative” - instead of consent from only the test subject, as the law requires.

In February, shortly after the EPA unveiled the rule, the NRDC sued the agency for permitting what the environmental council termed “unethical, illegal human pesticide testing.”

On Wednesday, Nelson, Boxer and Solis joined the group’s suit and urged a federal appeals court to order the EPA to establish a new rule that complies with Congress’ intent to ban testing on pregnant women, infants and children.

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