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Experimenting on children
A Times Editorial
Published November 2, 2004
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced a project with the innocent-sounding acronym CHEERS. Parents in the Jacksonville area who want to participate will be paid up to $970 and given a video camcorder and "an official, framed Certificate of Appreciation." While that might sound tempting, especially to a family looking for a little help with Christmas this year, anyone interested might want to know what CHEERS stands for before signing up - Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study.
More specifically, the EPA wants 60 families in Duval County who have a child under the age of 13 months to continue applying household pesticides as usual. Then, over the next two years, researchers will stop by every three months or so to determine which chemicals the children are exposed to and how that might be affecting their development. No, this isn't a sick joke, but an EPA-approved study that is partially funded by the chemical industry.
The EPA says the information will help the government protect children from harmful chemicals in the future. While that goal is noble, the methods being considered are indefensible. Even some of the regulatory agency's own scientists are coming to their senses and beginning to question the plan among themselves, according to e-mail messages obtained by the Washington Post .
Suzanne Wuerthele, EPA regional toxicologist in Denver, said she is afraid the study takes advantage of poor families and fails to inform them of the risk to their children. "It is important that EPA behaves ethically, consistently and in a way that engenders public health," she wrote, adding that if the agency fails to do so, its "reputation will suffer."
Unfortunately, it is the children involved in the study that stand to suffer the most. By offering money and a camcorder (which will be used to record the child's activities), the EPA is obviously trying to entice low-income families, a group that is also less likely to be aware of the dangers.
Linda Shelton, acting director of the EPA's Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences, said the agency would monitor chemical use in the homes and inform parents if a child's urine showed significant levels of pesticides, but that misses the point. The agency's first responsibility is to protect children, not to stand by as even a few are exposed to needless risk.
A humane and just society doesn't do experiments on children that even appear to treat them as lab animals. The EPA should cancel this study and find an ethical way to research the chemical threat to children.
[Last modified November 2, 2004, 00:32:22]
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