The EPA may be concerned about the environment, but they sure aren’t concerned about the lives of American citizens.
On April 2nd, I posted a blog “The EPA is Out of Control”. I didn’t receive any comments on it, and I don’t think very many people even read it.
This is a very serious and disturbing act committed against unsuspecting American citizens by our government. These experiments exposed people, including those with asthma and heart problems, to dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants. The EPA also exposed people with health issues to levels of pollutants up to 50 times greater than the agency says is safe for humans.
The EPA violated its own policy and Federal regulations, The Common Rule as well as the Nuremburg Code and the Belmont Report in conducting these experiments.
The website JunkScience.com has been doggedly following the EPA human studies scandal for years. It started a website on EPA human testing in 2012 to document the scandal.
This is certainly not the first time agents within or acting for the U.S. (or any) government have abandoned all sense of morals and ethics in the name of “science” or “safety.”
Listed here are just some examples:
Tuskegee syphilis experiment: A clinical study conducted 1932-1972 in which black men were tricked into thinking they were receiving free healthcare from the government. While the 600 men — 399 of whom had contracted syphilis before the study began — did receive care, meals and free burial insurance, they did not receive treatment for syphilis. Nor did their wives who contracted the disease from them, nor their children born with congenital syphilis. And in fact, those who wanted to get treated through local programs were prevented from doing so. Revelations about the study led to the 1979 Belmont Report the EPA has been violating as well as the Office for Human Research Protections as part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Philippine prisoner study: U.S. Army doctors infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and exposed 29 others to beriberi in the early 1900s. Four of the test subjects died. In 1906, Harvard University Professor Richard Strong intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera that had been contaminated with the plague. He did this without their consent and without informing them of the dangers. All the test subjects became ill and 13 died.
St. Vincent’s House orphanage: A 1908 experiment in which three researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin. Many of the children were permanently blinded and suffered from painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes.
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research syphilis experiment: In 1911, 146 hospital patients — including children — were injected with syphilis.
Influenza experiments: In 1941 at the University of Michigan, virologists Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk and others deliberately infected mental patients with the influenza virus by spraying it into their nasal passages.
Stateville Penitentiary: In the 1940s, inmates at the Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Ill., were exposed to malaria. The study, which lasted 29 years, was conducted by the University Of Chicago Department Of Medicine along with the U.S. Army and State Department. Related studies were conducted from 1944-1946 on mental patients at the Illinois State Hospital. The precedent of these malaria studies were used as part of the defense for Nazi doctors at the Nuremburg trials.
Guatemala study: U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in the late 1940s. Researchers later tried infecting people with “direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded… or in a few cases through spinal punctures.” About 700 people (including orphaned children) were infected. The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government. The research was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee experiments. The research did not come to light until 2010.
San Francisco: In 1950, the U.S. Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens (considered harmless at the time) over San Francisco to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack. Dozens of residents contracted pneumonia-like illnesses and at least one man died. Tests with Serratia continued into the late 1960s.
Willowbrook State School: During the period 1950 to 1972, mentally disabled children at the school in Staten Island, N.Y., were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis. From 1963-1966, Saul Krugman of New York University promised parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled in Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form to have their children vaccinated. But the actual procedure involved deliberately infecting the children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of patients infected with the disease.
Ohio State Prison: In 1952, a researcher with Sloan-Kettering Institute injected live cancer cells into prisoners. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy women were injected with live cancer cells without being told.
CIA biological experiments: The CIA released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside Tampa Bay, Fla., in 1955. A whooping cough epidemic resulted which killed at least 12 people.
U.S. Army biological warfare experiments: Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of infected mosquitoes over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., in 1956 and 1957 to test how yellow fever and dengue fever spreads. Hundreds contracted a wide variety of illnesses including fevers, respiratory illnesses, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid. Army researchers pretending to be public health workers photographed and conducted experiments on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.
Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense: During the mid-1960s, the U.S. Army sprayed several U.S. ships transporting thousands of U.S. military personnel with various biological and chemical warfare agents. The personnel were not notified of the tests and were not given any protective gear. Among the chemicals and agents used were the nerve gasses VX and Sarin and toxic chemicals like zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide.
Human radiation experiments: While much of the information on these experiments was (and some still is) classified, researchers conducted thousands of radiation experiments on the poor, sick, mentally disabled and some “conscientious objectors.” Some of the information came to light in 1986 in a government report, American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Experiments on U.S. Citizens that was issued by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
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