And people wonder why the poor and minorities so frequently don't trust government.
Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any potential risks. Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange, they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Associated Press reviewed grant documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewed researchers. No one involved with the $446,231 grant for the two-year study would identify the participants, citing privacy concerns. There is no evidence there was any medical follow-up.
Comparable research was conducted by the Agriculture Department and Environmental Protection Agency in a similarly poor, black neighborhood in East St. Louis, Ill. Residents there also were not told of the potential risks.
The researchers said the sludge could help protect the children from brain or nerve damage from lead, a highly toxic element once widely used in gasoline and paint. Other studies have shown brain damage among children, often in poor neighborhoods, who ate lead-based paint that had flaked off their homes. The idea that sludge - the leftover semisolid wastes filtered from water pollution at 16,500 treatment plants - can be turned into something harmless, even if swallowed, has been a tenet of federal policy for three decades.
[...] The Baltimore study concluded that phosphate and iron in sludge can increase the ability of soil to trap more harmful metals including lead, cadmium, and zinc, causing the combination to pass safely through a child's body if eaten. The results were published in Science of the Total Environment, a research journal, in 2005. However, there has been a paucity of research into the possible harmful effects of heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, other chemicals, and disease-causing microorganisms often found in sludge....
So, more or less, the people weren't told about the risks because the government hasn't got the slightest idea what those risks might actually be. And, of course, if people were properly informed of the risks beforehand -- or that the researchers didn't know what the risks were -- they might have backed out of the study, because people don't usually voluntarily expose their children to unknown risks.
Thing is, this is going to be presented as a failure of government issue, and honestly, it doesn't necessarily seem to be that. Not simply, anyway. It's a near-criminal failure of oversight -- someone, somewhere, should have been looking at the consent forms and saying, "Hey, where's the part where you tell people about the risks of doing this? Where's the information on disease incidence resulting from the sludge chemicals themselves?" It does seem to be a rather impressive failure of ethics among the researchers, and the Agriculture Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and Housing and Human Services do not seem to have covered themselves in glory.
Posted by iain at April 14, 2008 07:19 PM
