Not everyone in the bowels of the Bush bureaucracy apparently had gotten the memo about the "culture of life" being promoted as the White House's reigning new moral values slogan.
While the president, his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and a galaxy of moralizing politicians were preaching mercy for Terri Schiavo, ghouls were at work at the Environmental Protection Agency.
EPA had concocted an addled-headed program fiendishly named the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS) to determine effects of pesticides on infants.
How? By setting up a program to monitor real-time effects of household pesticides on them. To attract volunteer mothers in Duval County, Fla., EPA offered $970, a free camcorder, a bib for babies and a T-shirt to allow EPA to peek on the state of tots ingesting bug spray or whatever. One can surmise the mentality of mothers who fell for this deal.
EPA scientists presumably would blithely collect data but not interrupt research even if, for example, tykes became ill.
Using tots as guinea pigs triggered outrage in Congress, which also wasn't amused by the idiotic acronym CHEERS.
The program was cancelled a full week after the "culture of life" extravaganza around Schiavo's death, not because of any ethical awakening by administrator-in-waiting Stephen Johnson about the cruelty of the study, but because he feared he wouldn't be confirmed as head of EPA. What a perfect Bush appointee.
In a milder form, CHEERS was in the grand tradition of U.S. government scientists who previously used humans as guinea pigs.
Unannounced, for example, scientists during the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s sprayed chemicals on communities to test their effects on unwitting residents.
But the most monstrous U.S. program was the "Tuskegee Experiment," the U.S. Public Health Service's study of 339 illiterate black men with syphilis.
Poor Alabama sharecroppers, they were never told of their disease (only that they had "bad blood") and were never treated. As one ghoulish government doctor said with pleasurable anticipation, "We have no further interest in these patients until they die" and autopsies could be performed.
For 40 years, between 1932 and 1972, the program was kept secret until unmasked by a government whistleblower.
According to the book, "Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment" by James H. Jones, 28 men died of syphilis, 100 died of complications, 40 wives were infected, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
Scientists also concluded the program hadn't revealed any worthwhile medical information.
But, hey, it did provide U.S. government work for ghouls.
Pat Murphy
