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It turns out that a popular herbicide could also be associated with the death of something else: bees.
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which revealed that bees exposed to glyphosate, the main ingredient of herbicides such as Roundup, are more likely to die from a bacterial infection than those that do not. are not.
The researchers exposed the bees to glyphosate, then marked them with blackheads before leaving them free. The bees were examined three days later, according to the study, and it was found that four types of intestinal bacteria in insects were reduced.
According to the authors of the study, the affected intestinal bacteria help prevent disease and digest food.
The researchers then introduced the bees to a bacteria called Serratia marcescens – and survival rates depended on glyphosate exposure. Bees with healthy intestinal bacteria survived infection about half the time and the rest lived only 10% of the time.
Erick Motta, who participated in the research as a graduate student, said in a press release from the University of Texas at Austin that the big difference in survival rates proves that glyphosate poses a threat to bees .
"We need better guidelines for the use of glyphosate, especially with regard to bee exposure," Motta said in the press release, "because the guidelines assume that herbicides do not harm The study shows that this is not true.
However, not everyone is sure of the results.
Oliver Jones, a chemist at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said the study was using far too much glyphosate, The Guardian reported.
"In my opinion, the doses of glyphosate used were rather high," he said, according to The Guardian. "The paper only shows that glyphosate can potentially interfere with bacteria in the bee gut, not that it actually does it in the environment."
But in an interview with Newsweek, Dave Goulson, a professor at the University of Sussex, said, "Glyphosate is sometimes found in bee food stores, at concentrations similar to those used in this study.
And a spokesman for Monsanto, the company that makes the glyphosate, called the study "just not true," according to The Guardian.
"No large-scale study has found a link between glyphosate and the decline of the bee population," he said, according to The Guardian. "More than 40 years of solid and independent scientific evidence shows that this poses no unreasonable risk to humans, animals and the environment in general."
As stated in the press release, a phenomenon known as "colony collapse syndrome" has left beekeepers with a reduced number of bees as insects continue to die for mysterious reasons. Motta said the study suggests that weed killers could play a role in this.
"This is not the only cause of all these bee deaths," he said in the press release, "but it's certainly something that people should be concerned about because glyphosate is used everywhere ".
This is not the first time Monsanto's Roundup has been controversial.
A study conducted in July 2018 in China showed that bee larvae exposed to "high concentrations" of glyphosate had a higher risk of death than those who were not exposed to it.
And in August, a jury awarded $ 289 million to a man after claiming that the weed killer had given him terminal cancer. According to CNN, this man, Dewayne Johnson, said he used the product while working as a field guard. Hundreds of people have sued Monsanto for similar claims.
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