President Bush's FDA has already been drawing heat for its ineffectiveness and close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Now, as Juliet Eilperin reports for The Washington Post, the EPA has approved rules that would enable the testing of pesticides on humans.

The Environmental Protection Agency is set to release the first-ever federal standards governing use of data from tests that expose human subjects to toxic pesticides, but lawmakers and some medical experts said the rules fail to adequately protect children and pregnant women.

The proposal -- which was obtained yesterday from the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and will become public within weeks -- would limit the instances in which pesticide manufacturers could expose children and pregnant women to toxic chemicals, and would establish an independent board to gauge whether such human experiments meet established ethical standards. But the new rules, which will be subject to public comment before taking effect in about six months, allow some tests on vulnerable subjects and do not apply to studies conducted before the guidelines become law.

Much of the controversy centers on whether it is acceptable to expose children and pregnant women to pesticides under any circumstances. One EPA official, who asked not to be identified because the agency has not published its proposal, said the EPA wanted to let manufacturers keep the option of testing on children such products as mosquito and tick repellents to ascertain their efficacy.

For months, lawmakers have been dueling with Bush administration officials over how drastically they should curb tests that expose humans to toxic chemicals, including an insecticide used in chemical warfare during World War I. Two weeks ago, Congress prohibited the EPA from considering data culled from such experiments until the government enacts stricter national standards.

For years, federal officials allowed manufacturers to conduct human studies on the grounds that they provided a clearer picture of how pesticides could affect the environment and public health. President Bill Clinton imposed a moratorium in 1998 out of concern that such tests harmed volunteers; although President Bush initially backed the moratorium, his administration abandoned it in 2003 to satisfy a court ruling in favor of pesticide makers, which argued that the federal government had not engaged the public fully enough before banning the information. EPA officials now consider data from human experiments on a case-by-case basis when judging whether to approve pesticides.