Excess of volunteers delays research on perchlorate

Monday, July 16, 2001 | 10:30 a.m.

Publicity surrounding a study on human volunteers to test the effects of perchlorate on the thyroid has delayed the start of the research.

So many people volunteered to swallow a pill containing the potentially toxic rocket fuel booster that researchers at California's Loma Linda Medical Center have delayed the study up to a year.

The medical center asked for 100 volunteers, half to receive a perchlorate-laced pill, the other half to get a placebo. Each volunteer was offered $1,000 to participate.

The $1.75 million experiment was designed to determine if the pollutant, found in drinking water supplies in Las Vegas and California and 17 other states, interferes with thyroid gland activity. The results could influence how national and state drinking water standards are set.

The study, funded by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, is considered the first large-scale study to use human volunteers to test a water pollutant.

So many people volunteered to take the pills, that officials said they decided to delay the study until the publicity died down. The experimental dose is 83 times more than a person would receive from drinking lake or river water.

The medical center's Institutional Review Board "judged that those people may have been unduly influenced by the remuneration," Barry Taylor, vice president for research affairs at Loma Linda, said. "The remuneration schedule was revised and enrollment suspended until the media interest subsided."

Perchlorate was discovered in Lake Mead, Southern Nevada's major source of drinking water, and in the river downstream in 1998. Rocket fuels are produced at plants in Henderson.

The fact that military contractors are trying to prove there is no harm in drinking perchlorate-contaminated water could present a conflict, a study released today by the Environmental Working Group concluded.

The group alleges that lax safety standards could save defense contractors millions of dollars in cleanup costs. It said contractors already have made deals with the Air Force that will leave taxpayers picking up 90 percent of the costs. In Security and Exchange Commission documents, Lockheed said it is "coordinating with the U.S. Air Force" in further studies of perchlorate.

About 800 residents in Redlands, Calif., sued Lockheed Martin in 1996, claiming their drinking water had been contaminated by a closed aerospace plant there. Three of the plaintiffs have died of leukemia and other cancers. The trial is set for next year.

Perchlorate, a salt, can slow thyroid gland activity, potentially interfering with growth in babies and young children. In the 1950s doctors treated patients with over-active thyroids by giving them perchlorate.