Thanks to Angela Logomasini s Safe Chemical Policy News, we learned of another academic organization s disdain for the methods used by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the WHO, in their process of evaluating the widely-used herbicide, glyphosate, among other pesticides.
Better known as Roundup by Monsanto, glyphosate has been increasingly used subsequent to the development of GMOs resistant to the chemical: such plants are roundup-ready, being immune to its weed-killing properties. The IARC deliberations were so non-transparent, and violated so many of the strictures of sound epidemiology, that we were compelled to attack it shortly after their conclusions that glyphosate was reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen were published.
Now a new report comes to the same conclusion, and conveniently supplies a lineup of other respected organizations whose responses also skewer the ultra-conservative, precautionary recommendations of the panel. Issued by Academics Review, they pull no punches:
It would require doses of hundreds or even thousands of times higher throughout a lifetime a highly unlikely event for even a single case of cancer to be caused by glyphosate. Many commonly encountered substances including coffee would fall into the same carcinogenic category if evaluated using the IARC flawed approach to this report. Experts around the globe have objected to IARCs reclassification of glyphosate. (and they go on to list a number of those).
ACSH s Dr. Gil Ross had this comment: I should mention that one of the expert sources cited in this paper is our own from March 25th. The sad fact is that these type of reviews are entirely dependent upon the underlying policy of the deliberative body, and only minimally (if at all) on the actual evidence. IARC and its parent UN-affiliated WHO are entirely devoted to the precautionary principle, with a dollop of anti-business ideology for good measure. Anyone with even a minimal background in epidemiology, statistics, or toxicology would identify the flaws in their evaluation it seems as though they started out with the conclusion they aimed at reaching, and then they evaluated the data they wanted to utilize to get to that conclusion and ignored or manipulated the rest. For instance, they never take dose/exposure into account. Sadly, this designation will be exploited by the wide spectrum of anti-chemical and anti-GMO activist groups as though it were sound science, in order to scare the public and suppress progress.
