Renewable Farming

EPA already seen leaning toward a “pass” on controversy over Roundup’s cancer risk

Hearings by the Environmental Protection Agency this week will focus on the scientific question of Roundup’s links, or lack of links, to cancer in humans.

Investigative writer Carey Gillam has written a detailed analysis of the forces which converge in those hearings.

Dec. 12, 2016   — The EPA has received  more than 250,000 comments filed by supporters and those who oppose glyphosate re-registration.

However, the EPA’s focus on a direct clinically-based, cause-effect link to cancer misses the far-reaching biocidal impact of glyphosate, amplified by the adjuvants added to make Roundup and the many other broad-spectrum weedkillers.

The destructive connection with human and animal health is diffused through human populations over many years, through complex influences on the microbial organisms in our digestive systems.

Few if any of the studies which EPA and the other agencies will review have examined those pathways with either epidemiology studies of affected populations, or long-term clinical trials. When the microflora in our digestive systems are disrupted by a constant low-level dosing of biocide (glyphosate and its adjuvants), diverse symptoms appear which weaken the immune system’s ability to defend against cancer. The independent researchers who’ve studied these linkages are few, and virtually all are outside of the regulatory agencies paid to defend Americans’ health.

Many of the analysts who are tracking glyphosate use are outside the United States. This evening, our Iowa farmer friend Howard Vlieger sent us a 10-page PDF which summarizes an international conference Dec. 1-2 in Mexico City, where 21 research specialists presented papers and reports summing up 40 years of ag biotechnology and its related toxic chemicals such as glyphosate and glufosinate.  Most of the scientists live and work outside the U.S., and most of the observations they make in their reports are cautious to critical. You can download the summary of this conference here. It’s one of the most recent, broad-based reviews we’ve seen of what has happened in world agronomy the past four decades.

Keep watch for further scientific reports from Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, for example. Our earlier report on this website carries links to several papers that document these little-appreciate connections between glyphosate and health.

By Jerry Carlson