WASHINGTON (CN) - The Environmental Protection Agency no longer will allow legal guardians to provide consent for their wards to participate as test subjects in pesticide testing by outside laboratories.
The agency's action is part of a settlement with public health organizations wanting to overturn the agency's 2006 rule allowing for paid volunteers to test pesticide toxicity.
The public health organizations argued that the rule violated a Congressional human subject test ban and the Nuremberg Codes adopted in response to World War II testing by Nazi medical authorities.
In a previous action, the agency determined that it would no longer consider toxicity results derived from testing human subjects, when evaluating proposed permissible exposure levels requested by pesticide manufacturers.
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