TUCSON, Ariz., Dec. 11, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to an article in the winter 2012 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, research sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violates "every law, regulation, and standard developed since World War II for the protection of human subjects."
Subjects are placed in a chamber in which they breathe diesel exhaust emissions from trucks parked outside.
For more than 10 years, EPA has imposed regulations costing the economy billions of dollars, based on the claim that small particles ("PM2.5") kill thousands, even hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. PM2.5, which consists of particles smaller in diameter than a human hair, is produced by natural and industrial processes, farming, fires, engine exhausts, industrial grinding and friction, even dust from the ground in the desert.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress in the fall of 2011 that "particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn't make you sick. It's directly causal to dying sooner than you should."
The American Tradition Institute has filed a lawsuit asking the Court to enjoin the experiments with this allegedly lethal agent. Complaints have also been filed with the North Carolina medical board concerning physicians conducting the experiments, report Steve Milloy, J.D., and John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., in the Journal article, and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine has announced an internal review.
In a declaration to the Court, EPA Clinical Studies Coordinator Martin W. Case asserted that he verbally informs human subjects in an ongoing trial that "there is the possibility you may die from this."
"In addition to the shocking nature of this 'warning,' even if it were acceptable to risk the lives of human study subjects for the sake of science—and it's not—such a warning would need to be in writing, according to federal regulations," state Milloy and Dunn.
The alleged dangers of PM2.5 have been challenged. In another article in the same issue of the Journal, Jerome C. Arnett, M.D. reports on efforts to fire distinguished epidemiologist James Enstrom, who "exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda…based on fraud."
"The EPA is in a dilemma," states Jane Orient, M.D., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. "Either it has lied to Congress about the dangers of PM2.5, or it is deliberately exposing vulnerable human patients to substances it believes may kill them."
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties founded in 1943, publishes the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.