EPA under fire for using humans as guinea pigs for pollution tests

A newly released report from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of the Inspector General reported that agency officials weren’t exactly forthcoming when it came to explaining the full extent of the negative effects of its pollution experiments involving human test subjects.

The IG said that while the subjects did give consent to the exposure, “the risks were not always consistently represented,” as Breitbart reported. “Further, the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms. An EPA manager considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures.”

The EPA conducted its tests on those with health problems like asthma and those who were elderly, exposing them to pollutants with possible negative health effects — and with possible cancer-causing agents, the IG report disclosed. The agency conducted five separate experiments over the course of several months, between 2010 and 2011, to gauge the impact of diesel exhaust on human beings.

Eighty-one of the test subjects gave consent, the IG reported. But the IG report also said that “exposure risks were not always consistently represented.”

From the report: “Further, the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms. An EPA manager considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures, [but] human subjects were not informed of this risk in the consent form.”

The IG said that “only one of five studies’ consent forms provided the subject with information on the upper range of the pollutant.”

Some of the studies actually exposed test subjects to high levels of particulate matter, or PM, and of diesel exhaust and ozone.

“This lack of warning about PM is also different from the EPA’s public image about PM,” the IG found. The EPA has reported for years that PM is a deadly pollutant that can cause heart attacks.