Does EPA Grossly Exaggerate? Or Illegally Risk Human Deaths in Experiments?

“I was 18 years old and just interested in making a little extra money,” former University of North Carolina student Landon Huffman told WNCN-TV in Raleigh, NC. “It seemed like a relatively easy and safe thing to do.”

Huffman, an asthmatic, agreed, in exchange for $12 per hour, to be a human guinea pig in testing by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the effect of exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in extremely high concentrations for up to two hours at a time.

Through a tube leading from a diesel truck’s exhaust pipe into a laboratory, Huffman breathed air mixed with the diesel exhaust at high concentration. Over the course of a year, EPA paid him $3,000, implying that he was exposed for a combined 250 hours.

Applicable law prohibits experiments in which people are put at risk of serious injury or death not offset by possible health (not merely monetary) benefits to themselves, but no health benefits appear to have accrued to experiment participants.

Further, law requires informed written consent of any persons put at risk of death in experiments. But although EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress on September 22, 2011, “Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” and EPA documents specify that acute and chronic exposure to PM2.5 can cause “various adverse cardiopulmonary effects including mortality [emphasis added] …,” the consent forms given to Huffman and others did not mention mortality (death) as a risk.

The EPA wants to impose stringent new regulations on PM2.5, that is, particulate matter (dust of various compositions) down to 2.5 micrometers (about 1/72nd to 1/7th the diameter of a human hair) because it allegedly constitutes a grave health risk to those who inhale it.

So which is it? Is the EPA grossly exaggerating the risk from PM2.5 in documents it uses to justify its stringent emission regulations, but not subjecting experiment volunteers to risk of death? Or is it truthfully stating the risk in justifying its regulations, but failing to obtain required informed consent in potentially fatal experiments that are illegal anyway?

In either case, the EPA is doing something dreadfully wrong, and possibly illegal.

The American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center has sued the EPA over the experimental program on behalf of Huffman and other experiment subjects.

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