Overview

Pesticides aren't meant for people. They're toxic chemicals meant to kill bugs, rodents and all manner of other creatures. That's why the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is supposed to set very strict regulations limiting our exposure to these dangerous chemicals.

But rather than play by the EPA's rules and limit human contact with these toxic chemicals, pesticide companies constantly try to rewrite them and weaken our public health standards. So they intentionally test their products on humans to prove just how much of a toxic chemical it takes to make a person sick.

Despite the fact that these tests are unsafe, unethical and scientifically unsound, pesticide companies use them to convince regulators to let them use more and more pesticides in our foods and other household products and to justify keeping older, more dangerous pesticides on the market that would otherwise be removed by modern health regulations.

In 1998, the Clinton administration agreed that these experiments were ethically and scientifically unacceptable and banned the use of human pesticide tests in setting public health standards for pesticides. Now, at the behest of the pesticide industry, the Bush administration is on the verge of reversing this ban. PennPIRG is urging Congress to overturn the EPA’s rule to protect the public. More.