Friday, April 18, 2008

What Sort of Society Experiments on the Poor and Children?

If you don't visit Booman, this is worth a read. It is about scientists in the United States using human and industrial waste as fertilizer in poor, black, urban neighborhoods to study the effects on the soil. The families were bribed to participate and lied to about the potential side effects.

There are far easier ways to execute this study that do not include putting children at risk such as removing the urban soil (the approved method of clean-up) and testing it in a safe location. A proper study would have looked for unintended results, unexpected compounds resulting from mixing highly polluted urban soil with a fertilizer made with industrial waste. They only looked for lead. But, why do things right when you can have more fun messing with poor folk?

The Yahoo-AP story
Francis Holland's blog
The Agriculture Department's abstract of the Baltimore study

The answer to the above question is a cruel, evil, heartless nation.

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