Brief Note from Kip Hansen
On December 18, 2017, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a paper titled “Revised Glyphosate Issue Paper: Evaluation of Carcinogenic Potential” as part of a larger release of its latest findings on glyphosate, the main active ingredient in the world’s most used weed killer, Monsanto’s Roundup.
The revised issue paper was part of a larger timed release of a number of EPA statements on the 18th December.
The finding?
“For cancer descriptors, the available data and weight-of-evidence clearly do not support the descriptors “carcinogenic to humans”, “likely to be carcinogenic to humans”, or “inadequate information to assess carcinogenic potential”. For the “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential” descriptor, considerations could be looked at in isolation; however, following a thorough integrative weight-of-evidence evaluation of the available data, the database would not support this cancer descriptor. The strongest support is for “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans”.
The reaction of the American press was astonishing — almost complete silence. The major “Newspaper of Record” for the United States, The NY Times, did not mention the report at all — not a single line, anywhere in the paper. Of major US papers, based on a search for mention of the report in each of the following, these papers and news outlets did not mention the new finding: NY Times, Washington Post, Portland Tribune, Seattle Times, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, UPI and CNN.
My online search only turned up three (3) Main Stream Media outlets that carried the news: the LA Times [and here on Twitter](my lifetime, hometown paper), the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and Reuters.
[Personal Disclosure: In my youth, I delivered the LA Times seven days a week for several years, including the Sunday edition, weighing several pounds.]
As a measure of interest in the general topic, a Google search for “news Monsanto’s Roundup” returns 3,820,000 results — there has been a lot of news about Monsanto’s Roundup product — yet when the US EPA finally issues the results of if oft-delayed findings (delays which were reported by all major US news outlets) — the majority of US news sources remained silent. The EPA made public announcements of the release of the reports, including advanced copies to the press with an embargo date of 18 December.
There is no more powerful way to bias news coverage than this: simply to not report the news at all.
I have my opinion on why this non-event happened. What’s yours?
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Author’s Comment Policy:
Always glad to engage in civil conversation about the topic at hand — in this case the non-coverage of this major and long-awaited EPA report by MSM in the United States.
I will reveal my personal opinion later on in my usual Epilogue in the comment section, after I feel that most of you have had your say.
If you expect a reply from me, please address you comment to “Kip …” so I can see it.
I don’t intend to argue the case for or against Roundup and I will not entertain general discussion of Monsanto-hating conspiracy theories.
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just a question to ponder based on the Belgian Eternit asbestos scandal:
Now it is known asbestos can cause cancer. However at the beginning Eternit did do a lot of lobbying and even moved abroad saying it was not dangerous. that was in the 60’s the reason? Eternit was as one of the most successful companies providing jobs, which was more interesting then public health.
will it be the same for glyphosphate? Only time will tell. but like with any chemical causing cancer or not i use it as less as possible
all i know is that i just avoid any chemical as long as it is possible. i just would use it as a last resort. untill now i never had to use it in 20 years of gardening.
Frederik Michiels ==> Nothing wrong with avoiding the use of strong chemicals in home gardening — we always did the same until we returned to living on the sea.
The attention one can pay to detail in 500 – 1000 sq feet of garden makes their use unnecessary.
But commercial farming is quite a different story. Round-Up is used to give the crop plants a head start over the weeds — suppressing the weeds as the Round-Up-Ready crop plants get going — which allows them to shade out the weeds. This instead of one or more passes with the tractor to turn between the rows to kill the weeds.
Kip, you’re an outstanding contributor here and you have great credibility. So I’m going to ask you further about Dr. Seneff. In fairness, I believe her undergraduate degree was biophysics in 1968 from MIT (a fine institution from whence my father received two engineering degrees).
You may well be right that Roundup is not carcinogenic. But could you address the issues of the Shikimate pathway, soil mineral chelation and the possibility that glyphosate replaces the amino acid glycine in proteins?
yeah, it was denied by monsanto that it could affect humans till they found it does..
how many of the supposed “scientists” the reports came from were employed BY monsanto by the way?
how many utterly NON affiliated ever ones are there?
the EPA used monsantos literature i gather from other pages where it was reported -SOTTnet for one.
i watch people use roundup year after year and do they ever find they have no weeds?
nope
lotta time n money wsated when weeding tilling or even burningoff would kil plants AND seeds far better
Lissa ==> Couple of points: “I don’t intend to argue the case for or against Roundup” — this essay is about the failure of the MSM in the United States to report the long-awaited EPA findings on the ever-popular topic of Monsanto’s Round-Up.
Dr. Seneff does have a degree in biophysics — and MIT is a fine school. But Dr. Zeneff is not a medical researcher, does not actually do medical research — “her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions. ”
In the last six or seven years, she has made a new career out of trying to “prove” that glyphosate causes everything from gout to autism see “Roundup and Autism: Why Correlation IS Causation This Time”.
My read on her work is that she has, in her advanced age, gone “off the reservation” — using computation and statistical techniques to find correlations where none exist and claim they must be causations.
Since she is a trained scientist with lots of experience writing papers, her stuff reads very “sciency” — but has also been characterized as “nutty,” “truly unhinged,” and “dangerous.”
I appreciate that others may have a different opinion.
Ok, I looked at some (not sure all) of her stuff. Completely nutty. Multiple irreufutable ‘wrong’ grounds spotted in the first minutes. Pathetic
ristvan ==> Well, that was my opinion too….thanks for taking the time to address Lissa’s concerns.
No doubt California will somehow determine that using Roundup will somehow increase one’s risk of cancer, and require Roundup sold in California to be labled a possible carcinogen.
Interesting post. I espeially enjoyed george e. smith’s cricket story. It’s good to know that the venerable gentleman can discriminate between a googly and a leg break…especially on a sticky wicket.
bahamamike
Here’s a gentlemen’s bet for everyone: If/When President Trump gets wind of this discussion, and I suspect he will, he will tweet something along the lines of: “Obama wouldn’t let his EPA tell you Roundup is not a carcinogen. My EPA, freed from politics, says it’s not.”
Something along those lines will guarantee wall-to-wall coverage for a few days at least, and he’ll have performed a public service in the end.
The bet? Whether he tweets it. I’m going with “yes”
Kip Hanson, let me first congratulate you on your herculean attention to Comment response. Outstanding!
I found this glyphosate toxicity/carcinogenicity article tickled some fond memories of Bruce Ames. He gave a talk at a Dow Safety Day event sometime in the eighties which discussed chemical toxicity and the misuse of the ‘Ames Test’, which he intended only as a rough screening for possible carcinogens. Ames and his trusty sidekick Lois Gold, together with generations of collaborators, worked in this field for many years. They devised a ranking of chemicals, naturally in foods as well as synthetics, based on their HERP — human exposure / rodent potency numerical scale. All very interesting, e.g. celery more toxic than DDT, etc.
I have several summary articles through 1998 as pdf’s but unfortunately can not supply workable links.
References: Drug Metabolism Reviews, 30(2), 359-404 (1998)
Science, 258: 261-265 (1992)
bergbiker ==> Yes, it was Ames that famously came to this conclusion:
I did a Google search (UK, All) for “Roundup not carcinogenic”, and WUWT was the top result.
Hermit ==> Thank you for the report. Someone must be reading this
website….
Kip – as usual, thanks for the fact-based post that, by its very nature, takes on all comers and transcends climate wars rhetoric. I find it interesting that Monsanto haters and the GMO-phobic have avoided this post. Have they given up? I doubt it, but the reprieve has been nice.
I look forward to the post on Editorial Narratives. As an avid reader of the New York Times, I’m endlessly fascinated by their conduct on climate change. They completely ignore evidence presented by skeptics and follow their tunnel-vision kowtowing to the 97% meme. Whatever the political or financial considerations are, they must be really strong to induce the so-called seeker-of-truth to ignore common sense skeptical arguments. They should know better, but they either don’t or they choose to ignore it. This is irresponsible and surprising to me.
scraft1 ==> Thank you for you rkind words.
We’ll have to see what the readers here think about the motivations behind Editorial Narratives….I probably won’t be touching that aspect (way to easy to mis-comprehend the motivations of self, no less someone else).
But I usually try to use myself as a “sample of one” — and see if I can learn anything from that sample. I write what I write, express my opinions, using my own internal “Editorial Narratives” [analogous] because I believe [know with some certainty] that my views are Right, Correct, and Valuable enough to share. [“I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so”] It is, of course, hubristic — but all writers, communicators, public speakers, essayists, authors, …. are hubristic in this sense — if they didn’t think people should hear what they have to say or read what they have written, they wouldn’t be speaking or writing.
So, I suppose that Editors of newspapers or Science Desk editors are the same way — they just think their viewpoint is right and use their “bully pulpit” to see that their viewpoint is printed as “the truth”.
My guess is the news organizations will just leave the propaganda out there circulating the world like the DDT scam has for years. It still has value for the “cause” even if it is false. The casue being that we must have global governess to control all human things, AGENDA 21.
A few studies.
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in rats following chronic exposure to an ultra-low dose of Roundup herbicide:
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-015-0056-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39328
Roundup disrupts male reproductive function:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23820267
Cytotoxic and DNA-damaging properties of glyphosate:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331240
Ethoxylated adjuvants of glyphosate-based herbicides are active principles of human cell toxicity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23000283
Co-Formulants in Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Disrupt Aromatase Activity:
http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/3/264
Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Impair Retinoic Acid Signaling:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/tx1001749
Glyphosate estrogenic activity:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23756170
Adjuvants working together with the active ingredient and causing toxic effects that are not seen with acid glyphosate:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24434723
Glyphosate’s Suppression of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes and Amino Acid Biosynthesis by the Gut Microbiome:
http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416
RoundUp has been in use for four decades,
and there have been thousands of studies,
not to mention over four decades of use,
which is far more important than “rat studies”
showing it is safe if used as directed.
You can take your fake studies and store
them where the “sun don’t shine”, gregg
I wrote an article on the subject
in my climate blog December 6, 2017,
and you might want to read it to
learn something about fake “studies” !
http://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-fake-science-demonizing-rounduo.html