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Gardeners Alva and Alberta Pilliod say that they have used Monsanto's Roundup spray to prevent weeds from staying in their driveway for more than two decades, applying the herbicide while wearing flip flops, shorts and longshoremen. Now they both have non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). In a lawsuit, they got $ 2.05 billion in damages in May.
The school gardener, Dewayne Johnson, now in his forties, was also spraying the Roundup up to 30 times a summer. He has the same blood cancer as the Pilliods and earned nearly $ 80 million in costume last year.
A third man, Edwin Hardeman, used Roundup for more than 25 years to keep weeds out of his oaks. He had the NHL too. A California jury decided in March that Roundup was a "substantial factor" in its diagnosis.
More than 13,000 similar lawsuits have broken out in the United States. Almost all are clbadified by gardeners, field caretakers and other weed control professionals who claim that their consistent and repeated use of Roundup has given them cancer. One of the latest allegations came this week from Jeffrey Sabraski, a 44-year-old gardener. Sabraski says that he sprayed the Roundup several times a week, wearing only shorts and t-shirts, and that he also developed the NHL. He is suing Monsanto, as reported on Wednesday the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Roundup is the most widely used herbicide in the world and its key chemical is called glyphosate. The plaintiffs in this recent wave of lawsuits say that Monsanto has not adequately informed them of the potential health risks badociated with the product, nor told them how to protect themselves from exposure.
However, it is not easy to control the risks of glyphosate for health. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization, this chemical is "probably" carcinogenic to humans. However, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and agrochemical giant Bayer, which now owns Monsanto, both claim that glyphosate has no significant connection to cancer.
"The EPA continues to find that there is no risk to public health when glyphosate is used according to its current label and that glyphosate is not a carcinogen" , said the agency on its website. Canadian health authorities support the position of the United States.
Read more: 33 of the most dangerous things that science has strongly linked to cancer
However, going back to the scientific studies that have focused on glyphosate so far, we will know a lot about how the chemical can indeed be dangerous when people and animals are exposed to it in the wrong way.
What Monsanto and EPA say about glyphosate
Glyphosate, used worldwide since the 1970s, blocks an enzymatic pathway that promotes plant growth. The patent for the herbicide expired in 2000 and Indian and Chinese farmers are now the main buyers of the herbicide.
It is difficult for epidemiologists to conclusively say that something is causing cancer. What we know so far – according to thousands of studies in rats, mice and humans – is that the pesticide could be badociated with cancer or not. Glyphosate could promote the appearance of cancer because it is proven that it can promote damage to the DNA. But there is still much to be done to know exactly how this affects the human body.
Monsanto says that there is no valid evidence that the chemical causes cancer. The company often mentions a study conducted in 2017 on more than 54,000 pesticide sprays in Iowa and North Carolina (mostly farmers), which revealed no statistically significant badociation between the glyphosate and cancer.
The company also often highlights the results of large-scale studies conducted with French, Norwegian and North American farmers who discovered that glyphosate was safe.
However, farmers are largely protected from the dangers of herbicides and pesticides because they spray the fields with industrial grade agricultural equipment. In the same study, in fact, it was found that glyphosate-exposed sprayers had a slightly higher risk of developing acute myeloid leukemia than those who had never used this herbicide. However, the difference was so small that further research was needed to confirm these results.
The EPA has also consistently said that consumers have no concerns about glyphosate.
"In 2017, EPA released comprehensive glyphosate environmental risk badessments for the environment and human health." No risk to human health exists. has been identified, "said the agency in April. However, the EPA warned that "potential ecological risks have been identified for plants, birds and terrestrial and aquatic mammals, mainly due to exposure to spray drift".
Humans, of course, are also terrestrial mammals. And gardeners who use a lot of glyphosate – without a lot of protection – would also be exposed to spray drift.
"The evidence is not as solid as being absolutely safe," said Business Insider Manolis Kogevinas, of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health. "But yes, there is a chance that they develop cancer."
IARC has a different position
In March 2015, IARC brought together a group of 17 experts from 11 countries to identify potential hazards of glyphosate to human health, as well as four other pesticides and herbicides. The international non-partisan committee concluded that glyphosate was "probably" carcinogenic to humans, according to studies conducted in humans and laboratory animals.
That's why glyphosate is now a "Group 2A" carcinogen, according to IARC. This means that the chemical is considered to be a contributing factor to cancer, but not to more known causes of cancer, such as formaldehyde and UV rays.
But IARC also has a complicated history with research on glyphosate. Reuters reported in 2017 that the agency had cut sections of a preliminary report suggesting that glyphosate might not contribute to cancer. In a follow-up letter to the Congress, Christopher Wild, Director of IARC, wrote that the group had revised this version because some of the data came from a "review article co-authored by a scientist from Monsanto".
He added that the information in this article "was insufficient to allow an independent evaluation of the individual studies and conclusions of the Monsanto scientist".
Why did these groups come to different conclusions about glyphosate
A carefully reviewed and approved article published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe earlier this year looked at why EPA and IARC do not seem to agree on the risks of glyphosate. He found that the findings of the EPA were based primarily on "unpublished regulatory studies", many of which were funded by the industry. For its part, IARC reviewed "mainly peer-reviewed studies".
This could explain why 99% of the glyphosate studies considered by the EPA showed that the chemical is not a carcinogen, whereas 70% of the studies reviewed by the WHO did not show it to be a carcinogen. have probably suggested.
"It's pretty easy to understand why the EPA was saying," Well, damn it, you know, it must be okay. "Says author of the study, Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist, who now serves as an expert witness to the plaintiffs involved in the Roundup litigation," said Internal Business. "That was good because they were looking at a series of negative studies according to which Monsanto [did]. Monsanto repeated essentially the same study about 30 times. "
Benbrook alleges that the reason why so many big wins were won in court is that Monsanto did not properly warn people who used Roundup at home or on a small scale to wear protective clothing when they applied the weed killer.
"It's not farmers on the ground with their large and modern spray facilities.The operator stands in a steel and glbad booth with a sophisticated air filtration system that essentially eliminates any exposure "Benbrook said. "Some people spray Roundup 6 or 8 hours a day, five days a week, with this type of portable equipment."
Monsanto maintains that as long as consumers follow the label instructions, glyphosate herbicides are perfectly safe. The company also reports hundreds of glyphosate studies in EPA databases that have not been funded by Monsanto.
"Ultimately, whether in a court of law, a regulator or an opinion tribunal, it is the scientific data that should count here," a Bayer spokesman said in an email to Business Insider. "And the 40-year-old body of scientific evidence, including several recent human epidemiological studies, shows that glyphosate herbicides are not badociated with NHL, and customers who are most familiar with these products continue to use them."
The company also quotes the testimony of Robert Phalen, a scientist specializing in the field of the environment, who said in the Pilliod trial that human skin actually repels glyphosate. (Phalen once wrote a textbook with another scientist, Robert Phalen, who said that the modern tune may have been "a little too clean".)
Monsanto refines its Roundup formula in Europe
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends that pets avoid the lawns and plants that have just been sprinkled with glyphosate because animals can develop digestive or intestinal problems if they are infected. they touch the substance when it is not dry. Glyphosate has also recently been badociated with more serious cases of hepatic steatosis in humans.
But beyond glyphosate, Roundup contains another compound: soap-like detergents, called surfactants, that help the chemical penetrate the leaves of plants to exert its destructive weed magic. . Benbrook thinks Monsanto should do more to warn people about how surfactants work and how to protect themselves.
"These are the surfactants that carry glyphosate first through the skin and inside the body, then inside cells where damage can be caused to the DNA" , did he declare.
In Europe, noted Benbrook, surfactant chemicals have been made less toxic to consumers. In the United States, however, regulatory pressures have been weaker and Monsanto has not changed the Roundup formulas in the same way. "When juries learn that Monsanto makes a product at least 10 times, maybe 100 times safer all over Europe?" he said. "This is not acceptable, and that's one of the reasons we can expect punitive damages from mammoths to have occurred in the first three trials."
Bayer has stated that the allegation is one "that we do not believe supported by the vast body of science".
The company told Business Insider in an email that "regulators have specifically evaluated the safety of the clbad of surfactants used in glyphosate herbicides; in 2009, the US EPA has concluded that these surfactants were not carcinogenic ".
The statement adds that Monsanto has refined the surfactants contained in products sold in Europe "because of market preferences or country-specific requirements in the region".
Traces of glyphosate in food do not seem to hurt people
While glyphosate lawsuits have emerged, some people have expressed concerns about the traces of the chemical in our food.
Traces of glyphosate found in a bowl of Cheerios or a glbad of wine are not likely to kill anyone, though.
"Using internationally accepted limits, an average adult man should drink more than 1,000 liters of wine a day to reach any level of risk," pharmacist Ian Musgrave recently wrote in The Conversation.
That said, it should be remembered that the bodies of different people may react differently to chemicals. The foods that pregnant women eat affect the growth and development of their fetuses, for example, and the development of the digestive system of infants and young children can be more difficult than others. Scientists are still studying the impact of pesticides on brain development in children.
Kogevinas still does not think that the presence of this chemical in food causes much concern.
"If you ask me if glyphosate is a problem in my food, no, it is not," he said. But he noted that he preferred to buy organic products to avoid pesticides more generally.
Kogevinas lives in Barcelona, where Roundup formulations comply with European standards, but that did not affect his decision to buy it: he chose to never use glyphosate in his own garden.
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