By Daisy Luther
New reviews have shown that Monsanto’s Round-Up is not carcinogenic. The weed killer is perfectly safe, despite the World Health Organizations proclamation in 2015 that glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Round-Up, was “probably” carcinogenic.
This proclamation was met with outrage from Monsanto and a series of “independent” reviews that all agreed that the World Health Organization was wrong.
Of course, Monsanto secretly edited the studies.
Dozens of internal emails that the company probably wished had vanished into the cyber-ether have recently been released in a court hearing by plaintiffs suing Monsanto:
Dozens of internal Monsanto emails, released on Aug. 1 by plaintiffs’ lawyers who are suing the company, reveal how Monsanto worked with an outside consulting firm to induce the scientific journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology to publish a purported “independent” review of Roundup’s health effects that appears to be anything but. The review, published along with four subpapers in a September 2016 special supplement, was aimed at rebutting the 2015 assessment by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. That finding by the cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization led California last month to list glyphosate as a known human carcinogen. It has also spurred more than 1,000 lawsuits in state and federal courts by plaintiffs who claim they contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma from Roundup exposure. (source)
In the emails, we discover that Monsanto funded a review by Intertek Group Plc’s consulting unit, entitled “An Independent Review of the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate.” One must wonder how independent a review so-funded could be and how much we can trust the claims that Monsanto’s Round-Up is not carcinogenic.
According to Monsanto, very independent. Their Declaration of Interest statement said:
The Expert Panelists were engaged by, and acted as consultants to, Intertek, and were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company. Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.” (source)
But just like in the Clinton campaign, those darned emails came back to haunt them like the Ghost of Cancer Victims Past. Bloomberg reports:
The correspondence shows the company’s chief of regulatory science, William Heydens, and other Monsanto scientists were heavily involved in organizing, reviewing, and editing drafts submitted by the outside experts. At one point, Heydens even vetoed explicit requests by some of the panelists to tone down what one of them wrote was the review’s “inflammatory” criticisms of IARC.
“An extensive revision of the summary article is necessary,” wrote that panelist, John Acquavella, an epidemiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, in a February 2016 email attached to his suggested edits of the draft. Alarmed, Ashley Roberts, the coordinator of the glyphosate papers for Intertek, forwarded Acquavella’s note and edits to Heydens at Monsanto, with the warning: “Please take a look at the latest from the epi(demiology) group!!!!”
Heydens reedited Acquavella’s edits, arguing in six different notes in the draft’s margin that statements Acquavella had found inflammatory were not and should not be changed, despite the author’s requests. In the published article, Heydens’s edits prevailed. (source)
Ouch.
Monsanto has a history of skewing the science.
How can we believe anything from such a biased source? And it isn’t like this is the first time Monsanto has been busted for toying with the science.
Of course, Monsanto has a long history of rewriting science when it gets in the way of profits. Who can forget the Seralini study, in which rats fed nothing but Round-Up Ready corn developed massive and horrific tumors? Then, once the study became common knowledge, Dr. Seralini was publicly shamed and vilified. His work was pulled from the journal in which it was published, Food and Chemical Toxicology. But the fact of which many people were unaware was that the new editor of the journal who pulled the review, Richard Goodman, was hired straight from the hallowed halls of Monsanto.
As well, Monsanto recently sullied scientific research with a contract barring certain testing from being performed. A new poison product that they’d like to introduce to the market is called XtendiMax. While they supplied samples of the product to research departments of the University of Arkansas, University of Missouri and the University of Illinois, the researchers were bound contractually NOT to test the volatility of the product. (“Volatility measures the product’s tendency to vaporize and drift across fields.” source)
I don’t believe for one second that Monsanto’s Round-Up is not carcinogenic.
The repeated infractions mean that you certainly can’t trust any pro-Monsanto studies, and in fact, does more to undermine any potential trust a person might have in any product birthed from that company. Any sensible person would likewise have to mistrust claims that Monsanto’s round up is not carcinogenic. They’ve even been caught hiring internet trolls to combat their negative image, unleashing them on blogs and websites that post the truth about their deadly products.
In fact, you have to wonder whether Monsanto is single-handedly responsible for the giant American Cancer Cluster that means every other person in the country will one day suffer from cancer, earning the cancer industry well over 124 billion dollars per year.
Oh – and you certainly can’t expect the EPA to stop them. After irrefutable evidence of toxicity and death from Round-Up, those guardians of the environment actually raised the allowable level of glyphosate on food crops.
Between their genetically modified crops that are designed to survive every-higher inundations of toxic weed killers and the widespread use of Round-up, they just may be the death of us all as they pretend to benevolently feed the world.
You know your ads and your format make it almost impossible to read this post on an iPhone
Thank you for letting me know this. I’ll contact my developer and get this fixed.
If the US had universal health care, then maybe the government would care about cancer, as the government would be forced to allot more and more of it’s budget to these sufferers. Instead the burden of cancer fall apron the people and their own pockets.
Sorry, *apon
As a professor who has taught graduate level toxicology for almost two decades and as a person who regularly follows the regulatory literature, I see the need to add some information to your article.
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The first is that IARC has determined that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen, but what does this mean? IARC (headquartered in France) over the years has been transformed from a well respected agency performing work on carcinogenicity to a political organization who are essentially paid to find the results their controllers want. The result of this is that increasingly studies coming out from IARC are causing more and more to scratch their heads asking “What are they thinking?”.
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For example, IARC found sulfuric acid to be a probable human carcinogen which surprised a great many people because sulfuric acid is made up of sulfate and hydrogen ions – both of which are abundantly found in the human body. When you drill down and look at their analysis, you discover that they found increased incidence rates for cancer when sulfuric acid was used in lead acid battery manufacturing and metal pickling. In these cases, heavy metal ions (known carcinogens) were entrained in sulfuric acid mists and are likely the culprit in the cancers observed. This was supported by the observation that sulfuric acid used in industries where no heavy metals were involved (e.g., soap manufacture, perfume manufacture) no increased rates of cancers were found. Instead of treating the heavy metals entrained in the pickling and battery manufacturing industries as a confounding factor, they ignored it completely and found the sulfuric acid itself to be the potential carcinogen. Over the years, IARC has increasingly come out with more and more questionable calls leading some to question their motive and whether they are being directed to make determinations based on funding and direction and not the science.
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So, does any other agency declare Roundup to be carcinogenic? In the US, there are two other agencies that perform carcinogenicity testing that are or were stated in the Code of Federal Regulations as being definitive, OSHA and NTP, and to my knowledge they are silent on glyphosate (not determined to be a carcinogen). The US EPA has declared Roundup to not be a carcinogen.
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A second point is that glyphosate, when used on corn is essentially found in any foods at trace levels (typically found in “alarming” levels of around 50 parts per billion which converts to 0.05 milligrams per kilogram). The glyphosate is taken up into the plant where it blocks the shikimic acid pathway by inhibiting 5-enolpyruvylshikimate 3-phosphate (EPSP) synthase. In certain plants that are resistant to roundup, the EPSP enzyme has been altered such that the glyphosate does not inhibit it thus allowing the plant to thrive. Humans do not have a shikimic acid pathway so the glyphosate has no effect on humans. With “toxic” defined as anything with an LD50 of less than 500 mg/kg (the dose at which 50% of the animals die from an acute exposure), the LD50 for glyphosate was greater than 5,000 mg/kg and has not be measured. In some studies, test animals were fed up to 4,500mg/kg a day for two years and no evidence of carcinogenicity was found. In fact, an overwhelming number of studies have been performed on glyphosate have been performed and there has been no evidence of carcinogenicity. There has been one study that found at these extremely high dosings that some genetic damage was observed that could, but not always, lead to cancer. There was some question in this study as to whether the damage was caused by the glyphosate or the particular salt that was used. For a human to consume enough corn to obtain this much of an exposure that was performed in this experiment, one would have to consume 50 -100 tons of corn on a daily basis. For IARC, however, it did not matter that the overwhelming majority of the testing on glyphosate was negative or that obscenely large doses were required to elicit a response that might lead to cancer, what mattered was that one, unreproducible test did show some evidence hence the listing.
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Taken together, the overwhelming amount of data indicates Roundup to not be a carcinogen. IARC, becoming more and more a political organization and less and less a scientific entity, has made their evaluation based on an outlier experiment that has not been reproduced. None of this matters for the public hears the statement that IARC has declared this product to be a potential carcinogen and suddenly Roundup is the most vile product ever created. To put this all into perspective, the risk of cancer from Roundup treated corn is thousands of times less than that of having a car wreck, thousands of times less than being hit by lightening, far less than the odds of being hit by a asteroid, and about on par with the chances of the sun going supernova. Unfortunately, many do not understand relative risk (like obesity, smoking, not exercising are essentially infinitely more dangerous than eating corn treated with Roundup) for they hear the claim of cancer so all rational thinking ceases.
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I hope this helps.
Years ago I was spraying Round-Up on weeds in my urban garden, and an aging dude walked by and said (unsolicited) “You know that’s nothing but diluted Agent Orange?” I stopped and said…”What?” (in a concerned tone). He said yep, after the ‘Nam war was over, they started selling it to the masses. It’s all about money (what’s new, right?) I was inclined to believe him quickly because my grandfather died from effects of mustard gas poisoning in WWI. He was on the front lines in the Argon Forest and made it home alive. only to have his lungs/hearts stripped of anything healthy and died at the age of 56. So I looked into it, and immediately stopped using it. I warned my mother (who was a master gardener) and my friends. And I have since theorized that the increased use of Round-Up and pesticides because everyone has to have a pristine lawns and keep up with the Jones’s, is partly or mostly responsible for the increase in cancers, autism, gluten allergies/reactions/sensitives, peanut allergies, etc. It’s not a coincidence (to me) that these problems, which used to be rare, are now normal. There’s more to that, such as the increase in technology and research, but my point is that I recognized the harm that Round-Up causes and stopped using and have been making my friends/family more aware. I’ve even stopped using commercial flea protection on my cats (unless I have an unusually difficulty flea infestation) and use diatomaceous earth instead. When Pres Obama signed on the Monsanto Bill, I was enormously disappointed.