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View Full Version : Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study UPDATE



Jolie Rouge
04-08-2005, 07:16 PM
Quietvixsin posted a thread in Febuary :
http://forums.bigbigsavings.com/showthread.php3?t=459525&highlight=pesticides+children
which was debunked by katgirl and snopes ...

CHEERS


Claim: An EPA study proposes paying families to allow their children to be exposed to toxic pesticides.

Status: Multiple — see below.


The EPA plans to expose youngsters to pesticides in order to study what those chemical compounds do to little children: False.

The EPA plans to study children who live in an area where pesticides are used year-round: True.


Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2004]



EPA Will Use Poor Kids as Guinea Pigs to Test Toxic Chemicals

Dear friend,

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced plans to launch an outrageous new study in which participating low income families will have their children exposed to toxic pesticides over the course of two years. For taking part in these studies, each family will receive $970, a free video camera, a T-shirt, and a framed certificate of appreciation. The study entitled CHEERS (Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study) will look at how chemicals can be ingested, inhaled or absorbed by children ranging from babies to 3 years old.

Please take a moment to follow this link and join tens of thousands of citizens in petitioning the EPA to terminate this study prior to its proposed launch in early 2005.

More information, related newspaper headlines and petition here: www.organicconsumers.org/epa-alert.htm

Please also forward this message.



Origins: Yet again an interesting mix of truth and scare has been loosed upon us all. While the November 2004 e-mail quoted above is relatively factual, its wording leaves those who receive it with an impression far removed from the truth. While the proposed investigation is real, the nature of the test subjects is misunderstood, leading to the wrong conclusion being arrived at by those who hear of it.

Through a research project known as the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS), the United States' Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to gather data about pesticide and household chemical exposure in very young children. The study will begin in the summer of 2005 in Jacksonville, Florida, and will entail monitoring 60 infants (newborn to just shy of 13 months old) for a period of two years.

However, while the e-mail leaves the impression that poverty-stricken families are for the price of a camcorder and $970 heartlessly offering up their tots as lab rats, the little ones to be deliberately sickened by cruel scientists intent upon advancing human knowledge even at the price of 60 babies potentially dealt life-long serious physical ailments by exposure to dreadful chemicals, the truth is quite different. One of the reasons the EPA chose Duval County, Florida, as the site of this research had to do with year-round pesticide use in that area. The children who will be the subjects of the study live there. In other words, if all the clipboard-wielding EPA people stayed home and the project were cancelled before it began, these same children would be exposed to these same pesticides and in the same amounts, due to nothing more sinister than where their parents chose to settle and raise their families.

The EPA will not be administering pesticides to children. Children who are ingesting pesticides thanks to where they live will be studied by the EPA.

Given that these youngsters are coming into contact with noxious chemicals thanks to where they live, the EPA saw a good opportunity to examine the effects of such compounds on small children by studying subjects drawn from this particular group. CHEERS will track 60 of these little ones over the course of two years, measuring not only their exposure to pesticides but also to ordinary household chemicals (cleaning products and the like). The parents of kids taking part in the study will have to keep very careful logs on which products are used and in which amounts in their homes. They will also be required to videotape their tykes being studied and maintain logs of the little ones' activities. For this and for allowing researchers into the family domicile every few months to assess the child being observed and to examine the home, these parents will receive a $970 stipend and will at the end of the two years get to keep the video camera.

Last updated: 19 November 2004

The URL for this page is www.snopes.com/toxins/cheers.asp



EPA Cancels Controversial Pesticide Study
1 hour, 41 minutes ago
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday canceled a controversial study using children to measure the effect of pesticides after Democrats said they would block Senate confirmation of the agency's new head.

Stephen Johnson, as EPA's acting administrator, ordered an end to the planned study, a reversal from the agency's position just a day earlier when it said it would await the advice of outside scientific experts.

The aim of the study, Johnson said, was to fill data gaps on children's exposure to household pesticides and chemicals. He suspended it last November after ethical questions were raised by scientists within EPA and by environmentalists.

Over the study's two years, EPA had planned to give $970 plus a camcorder and children's clothes to each of the families of 60 children in Duval County, Fla., in what critics of the study noted was a low-income minority neighborhood.

EPA also had agreed to accept $2 million for the $9 million "Children's Health Environmental Exposure Research Study" from the American Chemistry Council, a trade group that represents chemical makers. "I have concluded that the study cannot go forward, regardless of the outcome of the independent review. EPA must conduct quality, credible research in an atmosphere absent of gross misrepresentation and controversy," Johnson said Friday. "I am committed to ensuring that EPA's research is based on sound science with the highest ethical standards."

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., had joined with Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in demanding the study's cancellation as a condition for confirming Johnson's nomination by President Bush. "I am very pleased that Mr. Johnson has recognized the gross error in judgment the EPA made when they concocted this immoral program to test pesticides on children," Boxer said.

"The CHEERS program was a reprehensible idea that never should have made it out of the boardroom, and I am just happy that it was stopped before any children were put in harms way," Boxer said, adding that she would continue to oppose any testing of toxins on humans.

On Thursday, the agency said it would await a report from a science advisory panel, a process that spokesman Rich Hood said could take until May, before deciding the study's fate.

Johnson, an EPA employee for a quarter-century and the first person with a science background to be nominated to lead the agency, has been acting administrator since Mike Leavitt left the agency in January to become secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. He was nominated in March.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which met on Wednesday to hear from Johnson, said Friday it would meet again next week to consider his nomination.

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On the Net:


EPA: http://www.epa.gov