Two years Study on effect of pesticides, canceled

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

The decision to cancel the study came only two business days prior to Mr. John’s senatorial confirmation to become the EPA chief. This controversial study drew opposition from at least two U.S. senators, one Barbara Boxer, D-California and the other Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida. Both indicated that if this study were not canceled, they would put a “hold” on Mr. Johnson confirmation by the senate.

“I have concluded that the study cannot go forward, regardless of the outcome of independent review. EPA must conduct quality, credible research in an atmosphere absent of gross misrepresentation and controversy,” Acting EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told.

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 the 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.

In an interview on Friday, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, one of two Democrats who said they would block the confirmation, said the study amounted to “using infants in my state as guinea pigs.”
Mr. Nelson said the study sought to recruit subjects in a poor neighborhood by offering parents compensation for practices potentially dangerous to their children.

The EPA had also 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.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency’s placement of politics before science in recent years is well documented. The agency’s feeble justifications for tougher air pollution standards and even shakier claims about the dangers of secondhand smoke are just two examples of EPA “mission creep” away from its original purpose that is to ensure basic environmental safety for the nation and into imposing on Americans the political agenda of left-wing green activists.