EPA comments on human testing lawsuit; Claims UNC is ‘independent’; Records show otherwise

In response to yesterday’s Washington Times report by Kerry Picket (“Lawsuit filed against EPA over pollution experiments on humans“), the EPA e-mailed Picket:

EPA is one of 15 federal departments and agencies that conduct or support research with human subjects under the governance of the Common Rule. All human exposure studies conducted by EPA scientists are independently evaluated for safety and ethics, and the results are peer-reviewed. The complaint has been referred to the Department of Justice and further inquiry regarding litigation should be directed to them. [Emphasis added]

The alleged “independent” safety and ethics evaluation is conducted by the University of North Carolina (UNC) for EPA on a contract basis.

In addition to UNC being an EPA contractor (ka-ching), the EPA extramural grants database indicates that the EPA has given UNC $33,602,103 for 92 projects (ka-ching,ka-ching).

UNC documents indicate that UNC received from EPA $8,252,644.45 in 2004;$4,586,728.98 in 2005; $8,884,433.00 in 2006; and $5,696,188.32 in 2010. Documents for other years could not be found.

As EPA might sing to the “independent” UNC… don’t rock the boat, baby

http://junkscience.com/2012/09/26/epa-comments-on-human-testing-lawsuit-claims-unc-is-independent-records-show-otherwise/