Former EPA advisor "outraged" by agency's failure to follow own guidelines in carcinogenicity assessment of glyphosate
EXCERPT: Dr. Zhang, along with two of her co-authors on the Mutation Research paper, had been members of EPA’s 2016 scientific advisory panel on glyphosate. But “Zhang was ‘so outraged’ by the EPA’s failure to follow its own herbicide-assessment guidelines” that she resigned from the advisory panel to carry out the meta-analysis herself... Zhang et al.‘s results... indicated that high exposure to glyphosate increased a person’s risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
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UC professors weigh in on glyphosate (AKA Roundup) and carcinogenicity
Belinda Martineau
Biotech Salon, April 16, 2019
https://biotechsalon.com/2019/04/16/uc-professors-weigh-in-on-glyphosate-aka-roundup-and-carcinogenicity/
[links to sources at URL above]
Glyphosate, the “most widely used herbicide in the world”, is in the news a lot lately, largely because the first of thousands of lawsuits, filed by folks who used Monsanto’s Roundup (or other glyphosate-based herbicide products) for decades – who assumed it was as safe as the company claimed it was – and then developed cancer, are now coming to trial.
To those of you who might be interested in learning the lengths to which Monsanto apparently went in defending its glyphosate-based product(s), I highly recommend that you follow the Courthouse News Service articles on these trials.
The opening statement in the third case to go to trial, for example, by the attorney for a California couple who were both diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma within four years of one another after having sprayed Roundup on their residential properties for 35 years, could serve as the basis for a great movie plot (IMHO).
As described in "Roundup Trial: Monsanto Used Fake Data to Win Over Regulators", Monsanto “seemingly planted one of its employees at a contract lab… in the 1970s to fake negative mouse carcinogenicity data for… glyphosate that were to be used to win regulatory approval for the weed killer in 1975; planned an attack to discredit the World Health Organization’s (WHO) cancer research agency, anticipating the agency would classify glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015 [which, nevertheless, the agency did]; exploited ‘deep connections’ within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to classify glyphosate as non-carcinogenic.”
You may have heard some of these allegations before. Bloomberg reported on the Monsanto-EPA connection in “EPA Official Accused of Helping Monsanto ‘Kill’ Cancer Study” (published in March of 2017), for example.
But maybe not others, like the much older scandal at the now defunct contract lab. (This 1983 article in the Washington Post provides some general information regarding inadequate or falsified data on over 200 pesticides – including Roundup – tested by the specific contract lab mentioned in the current trial.)
Jurors serving on the current trial are also learning about a new study, published in Mutation Research in February 2019, that found “a compelling link between exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma”. The first author of this new scientific paper, which comprises a meta-analysis of multiple previously published studies that were designed to determine whether glyphosate exposure increases cancer risk, is an adjunct professor of toxicology with the School of Public Health at the University of California (UC) in Berkeley named Luoping Zhang.
Dr. Zhang, along with two of her co-authors on the Mutation Research paper, had been members of EPA’s 2016 scientific advisory panel on glyphosate. But “Zhang was ‘so outraged’ by the EPA’s failure to follow its own herbicide-assessment guidelines” that she resigned from the advisory panel to carry out the meta-analysis herself. The resulting study is focused on the evidence pertaining to groups of people most highly exposed to glyphosate, and also takes into account the most recent publication on the Agricultural Health Study, a large and long-term study of the effects of pesticides on U.S. farmers that was initiated in 1993. One of Monsanto’s complaints about the WHO’s 2015 determination that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen had been that the agency hadn’t taken the most recent results from the Agricultural Health Study (AHS) into consideration. (WHO hadn’t taken them into consideration because those results hadn’t been published yet.) But after considering all the available published data – including the latest data from the AHS – Zhang et al.‘s results still indicated that high exposure to glyphosate increased a person’s risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Another UC Berkeley professor, Elena Conis of the Graduate School of Journalism and Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, recently wrote an overview of the history of how pesticides have been regulated in the U.S. that sheds some light on how we got to this point where pesticides “are innocent and on the market until…enough independent science has produced evidence of harm….” In her Perspective piece in the Washington Post, Dr. Conis mentions that the EPA classified glyphosate as a carcinogen in 1985 but “reversed course after six years of correspondence with Monsanto executives;” that since then Monsanto has asked EPA to base its decisions on Monsanto-commissioned science; and that “[i]n one instance, the EPA ceded to industry requests to remove a certain scientist from a glyphosate safety review panel.”
On the other hand, I, for one, am grateful to Dr. Zhang for removing herself from the 2016 glyphosate review panel so that she could conduct the kind of independent science that is so desperately needed to protect humans from capitalists who put their bottom lines ahead of our collective health. U.S. regulatory agencies need to correspond more with scientists who are not working for, or otherwise aligned with, the companies which make money by developing poisons (which is what pesticides were called until after WWII) to spray on our food crops.
In the meantime, while the safety of glyphosate is being debated in the courts, there are steps you can take to limit your exposure to it from the food you eat.
Traditional crops die if glyphosate is applied to them, but crops genetically engineered (GE) to tolerate glyphosate do not. So avoiding GE fruits, vegetables and grains (AKA GMOs) should reduce your intake of glyphosate.
However, some non-GMO crops, like wheat and oats, are now sprayed with glyphosate just prior to harvest to speed up their desiccation–and the regulatory agencies have responded to this new farming practice by increasing the legally permissible levels of glyphosate residues on those crops (see Zhang et al. and references therein for more information on exposure to glyphosate). Consequently, the best way to avoid glyphosate in these crops is to buy products from crops that have been organically grown; glyphosate use is not allowed in organic farming per the current USDA organic standards.