EPA human experiments debunk notion of ‘killer’ air pollution: Agency hides exculpatory results

[rushmc 18]

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has conducted air pollution experiments on live human subjects that discredit its claims that fine particulate matter kills people.

JunkScience.com obtained the explosive and heretofore undisclosed results through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and reveal them here for the first time.

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This data sheet shows the following:

EPA has been conducting air pollution effects tests on human subjects since at least January 2010.
By the time the EPA researchers had published their September 2011 report in Environmental Health Perspectives, they had conducted 41 such tests.
Of the 41 human experiments, clinical effects were reported by the EPA in only two study subjects. Both of these are controversial. One is the case study reported in Environmental Health Perspectives, which has been previously debunked. The other study subject flagged by the EPA researchers as experiencing a clinical effect (“a short episode of an elevated heart rate during exposure”), in fact, denied feeling any effects. This reported effect was most probably due to some pre-existing condition or other stressor given the low-level of PM2.5 to which the study subject was exposed. Certainly the EPA has no reason to believe that was not the case or that the alleged heart rate jump was due to the PM2.5 exposure.
The other 39 study subjects were exposed to PM2.5 levels up to 21 times greater (i.e, up to 750 μg/m3) than the EPA’s own permissible exposure limit for PM2.5 on a 24-hour basis (i.e, 35 μg/m3). All reported exposures among the 39 study subjects were greater than the EPA’s 24-hour PM2.5 standard. Seven study subjects were exposed to levels 10 times greater than the EPA’s 24-hour PM2.5 standard. No clinical effects were reported for any of these exposures.
Discussion.

There are at least three points to be made in light of this discovery.

1. The experimental results provide no evidence that ultra-high exposures to PM2.5 kill.

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress last September that,

[Airborne] particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.

These experiment results — produced by EPA’s own researchers — in no way support Jackson’s assertion.

2. The experimental results invalidate EPA’s cost-benefit analyses for its CSAPR and MATS rulemakings.

The EPA justified the multibillion dollar costs of its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) and its Mercury Air Toxics Standard (MATS) largely on the basis that the rules would prevent thousands of premature deaths from PM2.5, thereby purportedly providing tens of billions of dollars in monetized health benefits from “lives saved.”

But ambient levels of PM2.5 are typically far below the PM2.5 levels to which subjects were exposed in this EPA experiment. We reported earlier that the EPA’s 24-hour PM2.5 of 35 μg/m3 was exceeded only about 0.0096% of the time in the U.S. during 2009.

Moreover, the EPA experiment provides no evidence that PM2.5, even at very high exposures, causes any health effects, let alone premature death.

3. EPA and its researchers have heretofore failed to disclose to the public these significant results.

Finally, there is the matter of the ethics and perhaps even the legality of the conduct of the EPA and its researchers.

The EPA’s experimental data on PM2.5 clearly paint a quite different picture than that provided by the September 2011 report in Environmental Health Perspectives and the agency’s recent PM2.5-related regulations (i.e., CSAPR and MATS).

The EPA researchers failed to mention the results from the other 40 human experiments in their Environmental Health Perspectives report. At the very least, their failure to disclose their own contrary results raises serious ethical concerns.

As an agency, the EPA failed to disclose these stunning results in its CSAPR and MATS rulemakings. This ought to raise concerns about the legal bases for these rulemakings. More than simply ignoring its own negative data, the agency seems to have actually hid them from public view.

Conclusion.

In addition to these EPA-conducted experiments, there is other compelling data that casts doubt on the EPA’s claim that PM2.5 causes premature mortality, including historic air pollution data, current Chinese experience with air quality and the study “Fine Particulate Air Pollution and Total Mortality Among Elderly Californians, 1973–2002.”

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[livendive 8]

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JunkScience.com
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The other study subject flagged by the EPA researchers as experiencing a clinical effect (“a short episode of an elevated heart rate during exposure”), in fact, denied feeling any effects. This reported effect was most probably due to some pre-existing condition or other stressor given the low-level of PM2.5 to which the study subject was exposed. Certainly the EPA has no reason to believe that was not the case or that the alleged heart rate jump was due to the PM2.5 exposure.

Because observations should be filtered according to what the subject "feels", and data be delineated on the basis of "most probably"? junkscience.com indeed. lol

Blues,
Dave

"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

[yourmomma 0]

Steve Milloy ? Good fucking grief. If someone posted information from a "green energy ' lobbyist extolling the virtues of "green energy" you would, rightfully, dismiss it. That cunt needs to be made to live in a house built on statistically insignificant amounts of radiation , made of asbestos, and containing a second hand smoke generator and a DDT aspirator so we can see just how junk the science is.

[billvon 2,435]

>That cunt needs to be made to live in a house built on statistically
>insignificant amounts of radiation , made of asbestos, and containing a
>second hand smoke generator and a DDT aspirator so we can see just how
>junk the science is.

He would strenuously object. Like most pro-pollution types he only wants _other_ people to breathe dirty air (as long as he gets his cheap power, of course.)

"Live near a coal plant? Well, I wouldn't do it, but I have no problem with other people doing it."

[GeorgiaDon 340]

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of Steve Milloy's well-known role as a hack/lobbyist for the tobacco/dirty fossil fuel/well-heeled dirty industry du jour, the "experiments" talked about in the piece seem so poorly designed as to be almost certain to fail to show anything of interest. Particulate pollution is a problem in chronic exposure, over a long period of time, especially for people with aggravating conditions such as asthma or emphysema. You wouldn't expect symptoms from an acute exposure of only a few hours, in healthy volunteers, unless you used a completely unrealistically high dose. The acceptable thresholds for any pollutant are always set well below the lowest level that produced any effect in human or animal trials, to account for the fact that some people in the general population will be much more sensitive than others. It would be unethical to set a threshold at a level that you knew in advance would cause disease in 5%, or even 1%, of the population. So, an experiment where healthy subjects are exposed to 10X the acceptable threshold should not cause any effect, if the threshold is set appropriately.

I'd like to know what these experiments were actually about. It seems to me they were either poorly designed, or they were measuring something else and they are being "spun" by junkscience.com to fit an agenda.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)