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Research Ethics and the Precautionary Principle: Marching toward Environmental Decay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2003

PETER MONTAGUE
Affiliation:
Peter Montague, Ph.D., is Director of the Environmental Research Foundation, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Editor of Rachel's Environment & Health News, www.rachel.org

Extract

I recently read through the most recent 24 issues of Environmental Health Perspectives—the National Institutes of Health journal of, among other issues, scientific research into how environmental contaminants impact animal and human health. It is a catalog of horrors from a public health perspective. Fish and frogs with their sex scrambled; deformed frogs with altered hormone levels in their blood; a nearly threefold increase in birth defects among Minnesota farm children exposed to pesticides; 2,4-D exposure reducing hormone levels in men; insignificant levels of four environmental chemicals adding up to a significant dose; a third study reconfirming a 50% sperm decline in U.S. men, 1934–1996; phthalates elevated in the blood of Puerto Rican girls developing breasts before they are 8; some 6,000 chemicals declared candidates for study as hormone disrupters (selected by computer from a universe of 58,000 chemicals for “most” of which we have “no biologic data”); children living near incinerators having delayed sexual development; hypospadias linked to organochlorine levels in the blood of mink, otter, and polar bears; and “No living organism may be considered DDT-free.” Nothing definitive, but it all suggests that things are tending in a direction that is perfectly awful.

Type
GLOBAL BIOETHICS
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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