Documenting the history of pesticide hazards in the United States
The academic journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology issued corrections yesterday for articles that were published in a 2016 supplemental issue dedicated to reviewing the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer. Yet that it’s corrections are radically incomplete, claims Law firm Baum Hedlund.
Lawyers: CRT Correction of Glyphosate Review Only Tells Half the Story
The EPA, chemical companies like Monsanto (now Bayer) and mainstream news media are ignoring research indicating pesticides (including the herbicides atrazine and glyphosate, the fungicide vinclozolin and many more) cause heritable disease by introducing epigenetic changes to DNA.
“A chemical (glyphosate) that didn’t come onto the scene until the 1970s has now managed to find its way into every single pregnant woman in the U.S, except seven percent of them. We thought that should be news. But in the current paradigm, which is definitely pro-business, the only thing companies have to prove is that it doesn’t kill you if you drink it or take a big dose of it.”
He [Winchester] sees a potentially catastrophic outcome resulting from the epigenetic damage caused by pesticides.
Read the full story by Ken Roseboro, published on EcoWatch, August 16 2018 at: https://www.ecowatch.com/generational-harm-of-pesticides-2596453994.html
Written by by Anna Sophie Gross and published on 27 August 2018 in Mongabay: News and Inspiration from Nature’s Frontline.
Brazil’s pesticide poisoning problem poses global dilemma, say critics
“Toxic defoliant has been linked to birth defects, cancers and other deadly diseases from which millions suffer to this day.”
“Vietnam has demanded Monsanto pay compensation to the victims of Agent Orange, which the company supplied to the US military during the Vietnam War.
It came in response to the firm being ordered to pay $289m (£226m) to a school groundsman who claims his use of its Roundup weedkiller contributed to his terminal cancer.”
Read the full story, written by Samuel Osborn and published in The Independent on 25 August 2018, at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/vietnam-agent-orange-monsanto-victims-compensation-a8508271.html
We hope the lawyers for the Vietnamese victims will read and utilize the data in The Poison Papers — they will find ample evidence that the companies knew of the extreme toxicity of the dioxins in their products long before the US Military sprayed agent orange in Vietnam.
For years, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have been studying the effects of pesticides on California farm workers and their children. Partly funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, findings from this important epidemiology research have been used to argue for restrictions on toxins such as insecticides.
The research has found links between pesticides sprayed on fruit and vegetable crops and “respiratory complications, developmental disorders and lower I.Q.s among children of farm workers.”
According to the article:
“.. weeks after Donald J. Trump was elected president, CropLife America, the main agrochemical trade group, petitioned the E.P.A. to “halt regulatory decisions that are highly influenced and/or determined by the results of epidemiological studies” unless universities were forced to share more of their data.”
The article, published in the New York Times on August 24, 2018 was written by Danny Hakim and Eric Lipton.