Of course glyphosate is toxic! It is a herbicide after all – the whole point of glyphosate is to kill unwanted plants. Like all chemicals, including water and salt, glyphosate is going to be toxic to animals (including humans) at some dose. Compared to other herbicides, though, glyphosate is a pretty safe option for killing weeds. Don’t take my word for it, check out the Glyphosate Technical Fact Sheet from the National Pesticide Information Center at Oregon State. Glyphosate’s relative safety is one reason why it’s become so popular.
Glyphosate on Food
One interesting use of glyphosate is to dry wheat before harvest. To help reduce levels of toxic fusarium fungus on wheat, it is good to harvest the wheat as early as possible but you can’t harvest it until it’s dry. So, glyphosate is used to dry (aka kill) the wheat plants so the grain can be harvested. As long as the glyphosate is sprayed after the plants have fully matured, the glyphosate won’t be moved from the plant into the seeds. Here, glyphosate is actually helping farmers prevent a legitimately scary toxin from getting into the food supply. Want to learn more? Check out this video: Wheat School- Timing Pre Harvest Glyphosate Application In Wheat.
With glyphosate being used not only as a herbicide but also as a drying agent, and not just in our lawns but on our food, should we worry about our safety? In short, no. When used properly, glyphosate is quite safe for humans.
Regulation and Enforcement
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets maximum safe levels of pesticide residues for crops (called tolerances), based on the latest science. These tolerances are hundreds of times higher than estimated toxic values, and they consider a person’s total exposure to pesticides (with a wide margin of error to protect children and others who may be vulnerable). The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) tests crops each year in their Pesticide Data Program to make sure they don’t go above the tolerances. Very few pesticides are found above the tolerance levels (despite what the Dirty Dozen list claims). If the USDA finds any pesticides above the set tolerance, or finds pesticides on crops where they aren’t supposed to be, they report that information to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA puts the teeth in this whole system. They have the regulatory power to start recalls, levy fines, turn back foods at the ports, and so on (see page 5).
You can find the specific tolerance information for glyphosate in the US Code of Federal Regulations, 40 CFR, part 180, subpart C, section 180.364. Some of the tolerances for glyphosate were recently increased in the May 1, 2013 Federal Register, Vol. 78, No. 84.
EPA has reviewed the available scientific data and other relevant information in support of this action. EPA has sufficient data to assess the hazards of and to make a determination on aggregate exposure for glyphosate including exposure resulting from the tolerances established by this action. EPA’s assessment of exposures and risks associated with glyphosate follows.
Check out Vol. 78, No. 84 for a full explanation of EPA’s decision as well as insights into the safety of glyphosate in general. Scientific documents supporting this decision can be found in docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2012-0132.
Tolerances don’t set your mind at ease about glyphosate’s toxicity? Happily, there’s a lot of research that confirms EPA’s findings.
Research on Glyphosate Toxicity
If you don’t want to dig through these dense EPA documents, you can take a look at three recent reviews that summarize the literature on glyphosate and humans: Epidemiologic studies of glyphosate and non-cancer health outcomes, Epidemiologic studies of glyphosate and cancer, and Developmental and reproductive outcomes in humans and animals after glyphosate exposure. These reviews looked at epidemiological studies, ones that look at disease incidence in large numbers of humans with varying levels of exposure to glyphosate or that look at exposure to glyphosate in a population that has a disease.
Epidemiology isn’t perfect, but with carefully designed studies it can be a powerful way to look for connections in real human populations. Even better when we can look at reviews that put multiple studies all in one place. These reviews cover a lot of studies that find there is no correlation between glyphosate exposure and cancer or non-cancer diseases. The EPA documents have summaries of many of the studies within the reviews and more.
There are occasionally alarm-inducing papers like Glyphosate induces human breast cancer cells growth via estrogen receptors. This paper, and others like it, tend to use human cells in a petri dish rather than whole animals. I had the misfortune to do some research on cultured human cells myself and let me tell you, those are some tricky buggers to work with. Even when everything is working perfectly, it’s still very hard to tell if the results you are getting will hold true when repeated in a whole animal model. Something that causes a reaction in naked cells may not react the same when applied to your skin or taken in through your digestive system (both of which have evolved to keep you safe from many things).
Only a combination of animal models and cell studies can give us the full picture (even better if we can pair these up with some epidemiology). The third review above includes some animal studies as do the EPA reports. While I am cautious about cell studies in general, the majority of such studies have not found any cause for concern when it comes to glyphosate’s toxicity, as described in Review of genotoxicity studies of glyphosate and glyphosate-based formulations (open access) as well as in the EPA reports.
Single Studies Don’t Say Much
In any subject there will be a few studies that find something totally different from what is found in the majority of similar studies. In closing, I leave you with this recent strangeness: Glyphosate and AMPA inhibit cancer cell growth through inhibiting intracellular glycine synthesis. This obviously tongue-in-cheek meme plays on so many scaremongering memes created about single studies. As interesting as a single study may be, we must look at the totality of evidence. And so far, the evidence does not show that that glyphosate causes – or cures- cancer.
Review Citations
- Mink P.J., Mandel J.S., Lundin J.I. & Sceurman B.K. (2011). Epidemiologic studies of glyphosate and non-cancer health outcomes: a review., Regulatory toxicology and pharmacology : RTP, PMID: 21798302
- Mink P.J., Mandel J.S., Sceurman B.K. & Lundin J.I. (2012). Epidemiologic studies of glyphosate and cancer: a review., Regulatory toxicology and pharmacology : RTP, PMID: 22683395
- Williams A.L., Watson R.E. & DeSesso J.M. Developmental and reproductive outcomes in humans and animals after glyphosate exposure: a critical analysis., Journal of toxicology and environmental health. Part B, Critical reviews, PMID: 22202229
- Kier L.D. & Kirkland D.J. (2013). Review of genotoxicity studies of glyphosate and glyphosate-based formulations., Critical reviews in toxicology, PMID: 23480780
Biofortified 
Regulators are in a bind. If they were to accept the work of Seralini et al as good work then they would be looking to implement bans on glyphosate.
And in law, even if there was a problem, you cant just ban things but have to give time, often five years or so to stop dangerous products. Exceptionally there are instanteous bans.
Diazinon (another organophosphorus chemical) attracted a worldwide ban in 2000 after years after struggle to get its danger recognised. Rather like thalidomide, it has crept back into commercial use with promises that this time round we know better.
People look for no effect levels and think all is well. In fact that is the problem, as all is well up to the time when all is not well.
We know the effect of these things at high concentrations and we assume wrongly the same effect will not occur but more slowly at lower levels called no effect levels.
The chemical killers kill by stopping the normal life processes and while stuff like VX (an organophosphorus killer) does it very remarkably and quickly it is likely that given time the weaker OP killers will do the same for us eventually.
Typically for MS for example to develop, people drink their poison whatever the cause for their MS is over a five to eight year period.
Autism is sometimes a birth problem but for many it takes until the age of three before certainty comes that this child is one of the 70 million such that face or cant face life without up to 5 adults to support them.
Again we are not blaming neurotoxic OPs or neurotoxic organomercury compounds nor formaldehyde but something, somewhere is causing harm to our children and instead of explaining to the unscientific what it is we are all in DENIAL of HARM.
Pinks Disease took over 100 years to identify the cause. This cause was found, the illness all but disappeared but today we deny or try to deny the mercury cause.
Much worse any textbook trying to write about this killer illness for babies gets lambasted for reminding us where to look for todays harm. Disorders from chemicals thought to be PROTECTIVE of our health but destroying us for decades while doctors insist this mercury product is the very thing you need to save your child!
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John Fryer, your posts are just full of the usual misinformation you post about thiomersal in vaccines causing autism.
Glyphosate is a compound that contains a phosphate group linked to a glycine moiety. In the broadest possible sense it can be described as an organic phosphate molecule. But it is totally different chemically and in its behaviour to organophosphate insecticides. ATP is also an organic phosphate molecule.
The work of Seralini et al. should not be accepted by anyone as ‘good work’, because it is fundamentally flawed. The flaws are massive and start with the experimental design, through to the statistical treatment and finally to the conclusions they drew. All three were completely inappropriate. In fact it is one of the worst pieces of research I have ever seen.
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How much importance should we consider on this paper and on associated research?
See PubMed:
Food Chem Toxicol. 2013 Sep;59:129-36. doi: 10.1016/j.fct.2013.05.057. Epub 2013 Jun 10.
Glyphosate induces human breast cancer cells growth via estrogen receptors.
Thongprakaisang S1, Thiantanawat A, Rangkadilok N, Suriyo T, Satayavivad J.
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Not much.
The cultured breast cancer cells in a petrie dish and soaked them in glyphosate for 5 days.
There are a number of studies that have shown glyphosate is not estrogenic. Reviewed here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10937404.2012.632361?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%3dpubmed&#.VK8NF9KUfzg
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Oh dear. This Ms. Bodnar is going to feel really stupid and guilty when unbiased findings are finally published and glyphosate’s toxicity is finally exposed. Glyphosate cures cancer — really? This is the most naive, ill-conceived and dangerous article about glyphosate I’ve ever read. Really insidious. You poor woman.
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Making claims without evidence is more insidious than citing repeated and confirmed peer-reviewed research. If you think the research is in error, point out the gaps, and design a study. We can all do the study together and become famous for upending a huge amount of data and theory. You can share the Nobel Prize with Dr. Bodnar.
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That’s Dr. Bodnar to you. This post is based on the scientific literature. What do you have to back up your claims? I agree with Karl, if you have some ideas for new research, let’s discuss!
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Thank you for your sarcasm. Meta-analyses are not actual analyses. They just are used to confirm past hypotheses and flood the web with misinformation. There is far more money involved in disproving facts that show how glyphosate is harmful to humans than there is in disproving that glyphosate is harmless and generally safe. Seriously — this page is claiming that glyphosate is good for you if you have cancer. And I’m the one making claims without research? Seriously?
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Maybe we should start with some misconceptions. Meta-analyses are in fact analyses. The reason that meta-analyses are used is because individual studies might cone to different conclusions. Meta-analyses can both resolve that problem, but also tease out small effects that may be missed.
I will briefly digress into statistics, because it is important to understand this in the context of meta-analyses. Usually, researchers use a statistical cut-off to decide whether the treatment has an effect. Most often this is at 0.05. It is possible to think about this in terms of a bet: the researchers are betting that the result is real, because it is only likely to occur once in every 20 experiments by chance. But what happens if you do the experiment 20 times? In that case, you expect to have at least one wrong answer purely through chance. A result that looks real, but is not. This is a problem in statistics known as the problem of multiple comparisons. It is possible to manage for this statistically, but in the case of 20 different people doing the experiment that correction doesn’t happen. If the single statistically significant experiment was the only experiment people focussed on, they would have the completely wrong impression of what happens.
But meta-analyses are more than just dealing with the statistical quirks. They also rate the research studies for quality and give more weight to studies of higher quality than those of lower quality. Factors used include number of individuals, whether the measurements are objective or not, randomisation and blinding.
So back to the point. A meta-analysis should get rid of the noise (small, poor-quality studies that have a confounding outcome) to identify the real trend.
So what Anastasia points out in this piece is that the vast bulk of studies of glyphosate toxicology show low toxicology to mammals and low effect on humans when used as intended. She also points out that while there are some small, low quality studies that conclude glyphosate may induce cancer, the vast bulk of studies don’t and that it is possible to find data that suggest glyphosate will reduce cancer growth. Because that is exactly what you should expect if enough experiments are conducted. However, like the studies that conclude glyphosate induces cancer, these are likely to be a statistical anomaly.
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last line of the OP shows:-
So it appears a bit of a logical leap to suggest this page is claiming glyphopsate is good for you if you have cancer. The word cure only appears twice (more now that I’ve posted this) in this entire article and subsequent discussion. First when Anastasia points out that the evidence doesn’t show glyphosate causes – or cures- cancer, and second when you accuse Anastasia of suggesting that glyphosate cures cancer.
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A meta-analysis gathers data from multiple studies to combine them into a larger analysis. They are in fact analyses. You cannot dismiss them by saying that they aren’t what they are. You also misread the post, so I would caution you against saying such things and then claiming that everyone else is making claims without research.
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All the meta-studies referenced in the OP are from the industry. Some individual researchers whose work was reviewed in the studies have claimed that their research was misrepresented / misinterpreted. It would be nice to see an independent meta-study.
I don’t think we know at this time what the environmental effects will be of this ever-increasing use of glyphosate-based herbicides. I think it’s hard for independent researchers and the regulators at the EPA to keep up with the actuality of their use and the science on their effects.
U.S. Geological Survey
http://toxics.usgs.gov/highlights/glyphosate02.html
note – the results are from 2002. Do you think the presence of glyphosate in the environment has decreased since then? From Reuters: “The USGS said more than 88,0000 tons of glyphosate were used in the United States in 2007, up from 11,000 tons in 1992.”
I’m willing to bet that usage since 2007 has again increased exponentially.
and the AWRA:
Journal of the American Water Resources Association
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jawr.12159/abstract
I made a detailed comment on the meta-studies here:
https://biofortified.org/2015/01/medical-doctors-weigh-in-on-glyphosate-claims/#comment-1340055
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Karl discussed why your complaint about the meta analyses is an ad hom in the other thread so I won’t belabor the point here.
The total amount of glyphosate sounds like a lot… but how much farmland is there in the US? In 2014 there were 84 million acres each of soy and corn planted. Glyphosate is used on many other crops than just corn and soy and it is also used on lawns, golf courses, etc. IMHO patterns of use are far more important than the volume, and we have pretty solid evidence that glyphosate has displaced more toxic herbicides.
I find the runoff numbers very interesting because of the way the majority of glyphosate is used. Glyphosate enables no/reduced tillage and reduced tillage means less runoff. So it makes sense that we’d see less glyphosate (and it’s breakdown products) in runoff than we see for other herbicides, especially those that are used as residual herbicides.
I think that is why we get results like this (from 2011 Shipitalo and Owens) In runoff, max atrazine (MCL=3 μg/L) was 41.3 μg/L and max alachlor (MCL=2 μg/L) was as 11.2 μg/L. But for glyphosate (MCL=700 μg/L) there was only one one runoff event in 18 watershed-years that the MCL was exceeded and the highest, annual, flow-weighted concentration was 3.9 μg/L. The authors conclude “Planting glyphosate-tolerant corn and soybean and using glyphosate in lieu of some residual herbicides should reduce the impact of the production of these crops on surface water quality.”
From your 2nd link, the conclusion is “Concentrations of glyphosate were below the levels of concern for humans or wildlife; however, pesticides are often detected in mixtures. Ecosystem effects of chronic low-level exposures to pesticide mixtures are uncertain. The environmental health risk of low-level detections of glyphosate, AMPA, and associated adjuvants and mixtures remain to be determined.” Of course more data is always better, though the amount of toxicology studies that have found no effect, and the fact that glyphosate interacts with a plant enzyme, not animal enzymes, leaves us without a risk hypothesis as to how any harm might come about.
IMHO the biggest problem with glyphosate is that it is so damn good, so farmers relied on it overmuch and now we have weed resistance – although it is important to note that we can’t blame resistance on GM.
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Dr. Bodnar, my reply is below. The site isn’t posting where I’m “replying”.
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How about this article…….
http://healthimpactnews.com/2014/is-glyphosate-responsible-for-your-health-problems/
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Load of rubbish is the short answer.
Have a look of the citations:
Mercola.com
Greenmedinfo.com
gmwatch.org
i-sis.org.uk
anh-usa.org
A bunch of crank sites. If the writer cannot accurately cite the literature and gives a biased one-sided picture from untrustworthy sources, they are not worth dealing with.
Most of the arguments made in this piece have been debunked and I don’t want to explain them, only for you to pick another one out. So why don’t you select the most convincing argument made in the article and I will explain what the research literature says?
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Thank you for the responses….I’m merely new to this whole debate and really just wanted to know if that article is bogus.
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Tyson Adams, I agree with what you’re saying as far as the autism link being nonsense, but the rest of your reasoning, although amusing, doesn’t necessarily follow.
“Similarly when someone claims that the most extensively tested herbicide of all time, the safest agrichemical ever made, the most widely used agrichemical on the market, is responsible for [insert health consequence here, in this case autism] then you should be a tad suspicious. ”
You have to consider: if it’s the most widely used then it has the potential to cause a wide-spread effect. Note: I am NOT saying that’s the case with glyphosate, I’m just pointing out that it would definitely be possible for a popular product, even one declared to be safe and extensively tested, to cause health problems. The key is in what’s tested and by whom, and in how and how much the product is used. If a product has a tiny bit of toxicity but is widely and improperly used, or if there are effects not initially investigated, or the effects investigated were for only one component of the product, then considerations of accepted exposure need to be re-evaluated.
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It’s really annoying when replies don’t post where they’re made.
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Anastasia, it’s not really an ad hominem to point out that the meta-studies you’ve referenced (in fact the only studies you’ve referenced) are all from the industry. It’s naive to believe that there’s no conflict of interest here that might be likely to bias the interpretations of the research. In fact, looking at the responses of some of the scientists whose work was reviewed seems to indicate that misinterpretation or misrepresentation probably occurred.
“…leaves us without a risk hypothesis as to how any harm might come about.”
“The environmental health risk of low-level detections of glyphosate, AMPA, and associated adjuvants and mixtures remain to be determined.”
Of course, once glyphosate resistance is engineered into every commodity and resistant weeds have taken over as they have in cotton, then all commodities will be stacked with resistance to more toxic herbicides (as some already are) and any safety benefit of the first round of agricultural GMOs will give way to increasing amounts of more toxic chemicals (as it already has).
Why is the safety of a pesticide being defended on a site meant to promote understanding of the science of GMOs?
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One assumes because the alleged non-safety of glyphosate is raised in nearly every discussion about the safety of GMOs.
Odd question really. If glyphosate were toxic to humans then surely it’d be pertinent to discuss this when discussing the safety of GMOs – given that a high percentage of commercially available GMOs are glyphosate resistant. One would assume that for any GMO which is reliant on another product (herbicide, expression regulator (pipe dream!) or what have you) a discussion about the safety or not of the other product would, indeed, be of value.
A less charitable mind might wonder as to how much mud you require to stick before you stop flinging it.
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Chris, this is the age of computers. we should be entirely capable of putting into place a very informative system of labeling wherein they could be just a code color dot ( or many color shade dots to add detailed specificity)that references a key database to compare what is known about a food biochemically and be able to keep the reference up to date easily… say to stream known contaminant assessments in a particular food as the content changes through time with changes in the processing lines, or the ground the crop is sourced from, etc. But maybe that sort of database would be just too much of a threat to producers… too much info to confuse the mind of the purchaser?? Such a database could automatically screen for and warn of ingredients that related specifically to your need for cocoa-specificity, or for ongoing assessments of aflatoxin contents. Such a database could get out warnings of sudden discovery of food contaminant emergencies as well, to minimize the time lost to inform the public etc.
Your quote:”Labeling is only useful when it provides health related information that is really important. ” would then have vast public health cost SAVING benefit. IMHO
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Why don’t my replies post where I reply?
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No matter what food I eat, I want to know (to the best of my ability) just what I am putting into my body. GMO, non-GMO, organic… whatever, I want assurance (as best we can) that I know what is in the food… so that I can be basing my food habits as I see fit. That means, that I am all for GMO labeling… but that also means that that alone is NOT enough. Some system needs to be put in place for people to have far better knowledge than the current system practices. That means that our abilities at analytical assessment of chemical constituents that make up foods needs to become very much based upon pointedly investigative, ongoing, and pervasive monitoring. The problem seems to be that industry would oppose or obfuscate such knowledge base effort…why???
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Ray, do you get all the biochemicals present in every food you eat identified? If not, why not?
That would be the only way to know what is in your food. Otherwise, you are just picking on a few things that you have convinced yourself are scary.
There are many compounds that occur naturally in food that are highly toxic to humans. Aflatoxins for example. The way we as humans traditionally managed these natural toxins was to consume small amounts of them or die when they are in too high a concentration. We can better identify these now and manage their content in food through appropriate agricultural practices and testing.
Labeling is only useful when it provides health related information that is really important. Otherwise you get thousands of labels on the product and the information you need to know gets buried. I am not against labeling of GM food (it is after all the law where I live), but I find it pretty useless. When I buy foods I have to make sure there are no cocoa products in them – for health reasons. The more things on the label, the smaller the text and the longer it takes me to find out whether the product will be worth consuming.
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In all of this so far I have seen no discussion of the work by Vandenberg et al. (2009, 2012) on NMDRCs and low-dose effects, which effectively nullifies any claims of “safe dose levels” that do not take this work into account. Nor have I seen any discussion of the Swanson et al. 2014, a large-scale epidemiological study linking glyphosate to several deteriorating health conditions in the US (all three papers are discussed at length in my blog at smokinggmogun.blogspot.com. As a newcomer to Biofortified I may well have missed such discussion in other threads, so I would greatly appreciate directions to these.
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Swanson et al. 2014 was not a large scale epidemiological study. It was an exercise in matching curves in Excel. It is junk science.
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“you are just picking on a few things that you have convinced yourself are scary.”
Chris, of course I would select mainly the types of ingredients in foods that seem to have the most datagaps involved in their use justification or previous testing… to more intensively quantify in foods I would eat… only logical. Probably never reach testing for all the complexity logistically (or financially)… but more data provides better basis for safety decisions. We could do a whole lot better filling data gaps, informing public, and finding some of the hidden dangers in our food system. The data gaps seem excessive to me, but perhaps not to you.
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“It is junk science” is not discussion. so I still haven’t seen any. Please feel free to answer the arguments in my blog post “Causation IS Correlation”. I welcome real discussion, but I don’t appreciate being fobbed off with with a routine mantra.
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“A less charitable mind might wonder as to how much mud you require to stick before you stop flinging it.”
So I got some to stick? 🙂
This site is: “…devoted to providing factual information and fostering discussion about issues in biology, with a particular emphasis on plant genetics and genetic engineering in agriculture.”
“If glyphosate were toxic to humans then surely it’d be pertinent to discuss this when discussing the safety of GMOs – given that a high percentage of commercially available GMOs are glyphosate resistant.”
Thank you! Why is such straightforwardness so hard to come by in this discussion? Why are we pretending that the crux of the GMO debate isn’t about American commodity crops, the food supply and pesticides? We’re not discussing the engineering of more toxic tolerances (the Mad Moms don’t seem to be aware of those yet), nor are we discussing the comeback of “pharming” (surely a greater health and environmental risk than ag GMOs – although they are a part of agricultural production). Instead we’re discussing the hope for humanitarian and environmental benefits, disease resistance, etc. – anything to cast the technology in a better public light.
This is about business and economics. We want people to accept GMOs because GMOs make money. More precisely, we want them to feel safe about the GMOs they’re aware of. If it’s not on their radar, we don’t need to talk about it. Mad Moms are up in arms about glyphosate, so let’s show them it’s safe. I agree as far as comparisons to other pesticides. But I don’t agree with the overall approach – seriously: glyphosate resistant Kentucky Bluegrass? Multiple Cry proteins in our biggest commodities?
I think glyphosate-tolerant crops have done their service. I don’t think it was ever a good idea to engineer crops to produce Cry toxins. Now glyphosate resistance has been engineered into alfalfa, sugar beets, and is sprayed on crops to “dry” them. Legislative success. Marketing success. Shareholder success. Environmental and food failure.
My non-expert personal opinion of course.
Thanks for your straightforward comment.
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Ewan, sorry, that was a reply to you. My replies only occasionally post where I make them
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Editor’s note: If you always click “Reply” on the post you want to reply to, it should appear as a reply. If that is not happening, then feel free to contact us via the link in the navigation bar at the top to get that worked out.
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I have also been frustrated when replies do not appear under what they refer to.
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Thank you – let’s see where this posts.
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Dear Mlema, all Cry proteins are safe to humans, so I don’t see a problem with multiple proteins in corn or cotton. In fact for resistance management purposes it is better to have multiple proteins. It is also necessary to remember that sprayed on Bt contains many insecticidal protiens, not all of which are completely safe to mammals.
As for glyphosate resistant Kentucky bluegrass, I can’t get excited about it. I think glyphosate is far too valuable a herbicide to be wasted on golf courses.
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Chris, thanks.
I don’t think it’s ecologically sound to engineer multiple Cry toxins into many millions of acres of crops. They bind tightly to certain types of soil, and remain active for several months. They kills some non-target insects, and have already helped generate resistance. We need more research to learn about it’s effects on soil and crop health.
http://www.amjbot.org/content/99/4/700.full.pdf+html
Engineered bt is expressed throughout the plant and throughout the growing cycle. This is counter to the principles of integrated pest management. No pesticide is perfect, but bt sprays can have a lower impact, although they’re more difficult to use.
I’m not excited about RR Kentucky Bluegrass either. But here in the US we apparently need to be able to spray everything with glyphosate.
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Just out:
Carcinogenicity of tetrachlorvinphos, parathion, malathion, diazinon, and glyphosate
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045%2815%2970134-8/fulltext
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And the response from the Germans:
Click to access does-glyphosate-cause-cancer.pdf
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im doing a report on herbicides this was very helpful. but do you have any other information specifically on roundup? is it true it kills the skin cells?
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I am not a scientist; but I am a PR expert and Communications Specialist; which means, I know how the public perceive any threat to their lives, health or well beings…UNFAVOURABLY! When any company or organization claims something is good for you and isn’t, you get a backlash; when an organization produces, publishes or makes false statements, false claims, or uses contrived data, to bolster the ‘safety’ effects of its findings, the public losses confidence in the producer or manufacturer of these products!
I need to ask, if Glyphosate is so safe, and Roundup, is so benign, why all the lies Monsanto? Why all the tens of millions spent in lobbying-efforts, and Counter-PR measures to silence your products critics? And why, in 2009, did a French court find Monsanto guilty of lying; falsely advertising its Roundup herbicide as “biodegradable,” “environmentally friendly” and claiming it “left the soil clean.”? Surely, if you want public acceptance of any product, you need to create confidence and trust first; and nothing destroys this trust faster and more permanently than outright lies to your consumers! Monsanto, you’ve got some explaining to do!
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You do realize that we’re not Monsanto, right?
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