WASHINGTON — The Bush administration announced Friday a temporary ban on the use of human tests for setting pesticide regulations and asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the scientific and ethical implications of intentionally exposing people to the toxic chemicals.
The moratorium comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is completing its first assessment of the cumulative health effects of certain pesticides and is in the midst of re-registering scores of pesticides to ensure their safety for children.
Pesticide companies have been funding clinical studies that expose paid volunteers to pesticides and then submitting the data to the EPA to persuade regulators not to further restrict applications of the widely used chemicals.
"Our paramount concern in developing our policy on these studies must be the protection of human health and adherence to the most rigorous ethical and scientific standards," EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said.
As recently as a few weeks ago, the Bush administration had considered data from human tests when it re-registered several pesticides commonly used on a wide range of produce, grain and other crops. The administration told pesticide companies that it would continue to do so.
That reversed the Clinton administration's informal moratorium on such tests. It also appeared to disregard recommendations of a scientific panel, assembled by the agency in late 1998, that human studies be used only in rare cases, if ever.
Whitman's announcement came less than three weeks after The Times reported that the Bush administration had quietly abandoned the moratorium.
h the press ferreting this out, it was going to happen," said Erik Nelson, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "They recognize that the public is disgusted by these tests, and they recognize that the tests are scientifically severely flawed and have serious ethical problems."
Environmentalists called the announcement a positive step but said the administration should have banned the practice outright.
"If industry cares so much about understanding the long-term effects and short-term effects of pesticides on humans, they should study farm workers more," said Richard Wiles, a vice president of the Environmental Research Group, a Washington-based organization. Studies of farm workers and their children, Wiles said, could show what happens when people are exposed to the toxic chemicals.
