UN scientific group edits data in key study targeting weed killer component
Safe chemical deniers.
Reports are surfacing of another scientific group revising data to conform to a pre-determined result.
This time, the studies affected center on glyphosate, an important ingredient in Roundup weed killer. In fact, the State of California plans to force the manufacturer to label the popular product as a carcinogen.
Regulators in California took a pivotal step on Monday toward becoming the first state to require the popular weed killer Roundup to come with a label warning that it’s known to cause cancer.
Officials announced that starting July 7 the weed killer’s main ingredient, glyphosate, will appear on a list California keeps of potentially cancerous chemicals. A year later, the listing could come with warning labels on the product, officials said.
There currently is a federal lawsuit in a San Francisco court in which the manufacturer, Monsanto, is defending the product’s reputation as safe to use.
Roundup and similar products are used around the world on everything from row crops to home gardens. It is Monsanto’s flagship product, and industry-funded research has long found it to be relatively safe. A case in federal court in San Francisco has challenged that conclusion, building on the findings of an international panel that claimed Roundup’s main ingredient might cause cancer.
The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
The 184 plaintiffs in this lawsuit are using a 2015 study from the International Agency for Research on Cancer to bolster their claims.
It turns out that the United Nations’ cancer agency edited contradictory data out of a high-profile study on glyphosate.
…Reuters obtained a draft copy of IARC’s 2015 study, which shows edits made to bolster evidence that glyphosate could cause cancer in humans.
IARC scientists removed “multiple scientists’ conclusions that their studies had found no link between glyphosate and cancer in laboratory animals,” Reuters reported of the changes, noting that animal testing was largely how IARC justified its conclusion.
“In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumors was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one,” Reuters reported of the 10 major changes made to IARC’s draft document.
It also appears a National Cancer Institute scientist withheld new data from IARC showing glyphosate did not cause cancer.
House Republican Trey Gowdy wants to know why a scientist with the National Cancer Institute withheld evidence from a government agency showing that a widely used herbicide does not cause cancer.
Gowdy, a South Carolina congressman who chairs the House Oversight Committee, noted in a letter Tuesday to the National Institute of Health (NIH) that NCI scientist Aaron Blair was the researcher who reviewed a separate study showing no evidence glyphosate causes cancer.
…His letter asked NIH for evidence laying out Blair’s decision to keep this separate study out of the IARC assessment. The conclusion had an impact on Monsanto, a large agribusiness that produces the weed killer Roundup, which contains glyphosate.
I suppose that if you are a cancer researcher, finding a new substance that could cause cancer might be difficult as most of the materials that do so have been identified and new substances that are developed are generally designed to fight cancer. Furthermore, if you are a person who loves regulations and hates big business, targeting a key ingredient with new rules and warnings might be appealing.
Hopefully, the case will be decided on real science and not by safe chemical deniers.
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Comments
When will they label their state of California as the well-known carcinogen it is?
I am sick of reading on labels that California has determined a product causes cancer. And no other body has. I might add that our Department of Health is also tired of it as it arouses the left wing loons to mau mau against commonly used products.
Maybe you could drink a shot glass full so we can watch.
Fentanyl is used every day in hospitals and doesn’t cause cancer. You drink a shot glass of that and I’ll follow with a glass of Roundup.
Your move.
Bad news. Everything with protons in it causes cancer.
In other words…..
DANGER/WARNING: Life is Terminal. Life is Hazardous to your Health.
When I was reading the post, my initial thought was that companies should just update their labels with a “everything could cause cancer” warning.
Works for me.
Hey look. I found that UN science group.
(Warning: Contains pictures of Democrats!)
http://www.gocomics.com/glennmccoy/2017/10/13
Other Toxic Actions of California Politicians…..
“California recently reduced the penalty for deliberately infecting an unsuspecting person with HIV from a felony to a misdemeanor. This was very happy news to the segment of the gay community that celebrates deliberately infecting unsuspecting people with HIV. Chad Felix Greene, on the other hand, thinks this is a bad thing.
[W]hen faced with real-life situations in which HIV+ people intentionally lie about their status and expose or infect others [the LGBT Left] hold tight to their narrative. The story of Michael Johnson, for example, only served to fuel their argument. In 2015 Johnson was convicted of infecting one man and exposing four others. He lied about his status online and intentionally exposed all five men. The Human Rights Campaign spun the story as one of racial oppression and homophobia
[…]
I have argued that if every HIV+ gay man alone, even 80% of us, took our medications properly, informed our partners and made responsible sexual choices while vowing to never allow our own virus to escape into the world, HIV would be eliminated. We are the primary cause of HIV in the country and we could stop it.
Sadly the LGBT media is more focused on genuinely outdated ideas of ‘stigma’ and social injustice than on eliminating HIV.”
http://www.gaypatriot.net/2017/10/08/dont-tell-dont-ask/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsQyru5ACmA
It’s really the neutrons that get you.
California deemed cinnamon a health hazard for pregnant women and has forced grocers to place warning placards on spice shelves.
They also cherry-pick and manipulate data to try to make it sound like it’s single-handedly to blame for CCD (colony collapse disorder) in the bee world, and have succeeded in getting some beekeepers so worked up about it that they want it banned entirely as well. There’s always a running battle between sane believers in science and evidence-based beekeeping and the hippy-dippy liberal greenie contingent (who might have one or two colonies of backyard bees that they refuse to treat with CHEMICALZ and so lose the lot to varroa every few years and then blame the dead-out on Monsanto). The hysteria these people work themselves into is unbelievable.
If you ever run across a “Ban RoundUp, Save The Bees” type, here are a few links to rebut them:
https://entomologytoday.org/2015/10/13/glyphosate-acetamiprid-low-toxicity-honey-bees-2/
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/11/03/glyphosate-is-no-bee-killer/
In the first place, the IARC is part of the WHO which is part of the UN. As we have seen, UN scientific agencies always produce results which are not accurate and adhere to a liberal political agenda. They never let facts get in the way of a politically correct summary.
What people have to understand is that everything in the world can kill you, and it does. Too much water, you drown. Too much oxygen and you suffer oxygen toxicity and can die. ut, this does not stop the doomsayers from spouting nonsense. Remember the saccharin causes cancer scare? In order to produce consistent cancerous growths in laboratory mice, the mice were fed what would have been equivalent to several tons for a normal sized human being. As no one was ingesting this much saccharin, in a year, the chances of it causing cancer in a human being were very small.
If you use Round-up, or similar products, you should follow the same protective procedures that you do for any other potentially harmful product, including gasoline. Wear plastic or rubber gloves when possible. Wash your hands after using the product. Avoid inhaling it. And,store it responsibly.
Well, are you surprised? They just appointed Robert “kill all white farmers” Mugabe as head of WHO.
They didn’t appoint him head of the WHO. They named him an WHO “goodwill ambassador.” It’s still ridiculous, but not quite as bad as you’re making out.
And of course plaintiff attorneys are running TV ads trolling for cancer victims who may have walked by a Roundup display at Walmart.
This is of course a clear first amendment violation, but it will take at least one seat change on the Supreme Court to uphold Monsanto’s right to refuse to say things it believes to be untrue.
“Monsanto”. I just realized how similar that is to “Ron Santo”. (I notice things like that. It’s a gift.)
Having taught toxicology for decades, I can confidently tell you that you are making a rookie error in this report. You can never, ever prove the absence of something such as a product not causing cancer. The very best you can do is to show that the product in question does not behave in the body consistently with that of a carcinogen.
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This brings us to the next point. Because you can never conclusively show the absence of carcinogenicity, those agencies such as IARC and NTP have adopted the role of hating industry and wanting to label all they can as being carcinogens. Their modus operandi it to test something until one test comes back positive and then never revisit the positive test for that is all they need in their effort to condemn all the chemicals they want condemned. IARC has a long history of ignoring exculpatory data so they can label something as being cancer causing. They started by labeling sulfuric acid a carcinogen by ignoring how it caused cancer only when it was used in conjunction with heavy metals (e.g., lead acid battery manufacturing, metal pickling) while ignoring the utter absence of carcinogenic behavior when used in other industries such as the perfume industry. In this study, clearly the entrained heavy metals in sulfuric acid mists caused the cancers and was a confounding factor, but they refused to admit this. Likewise sulfuric acid is nothing more than sulfate ion and hydrogen ions (protons). Since you body is chock full of both and you are not a walking tumor, then it would stand to reason that sulfuric acid is not a carcinogen, but IARC disagreed and found it to be so.
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Now for the behind the scenes story. California and other “free thinking” organizations have long held that any pesticide or herbicide was a poison and it was their duty to destroy their usage in order to make the world a safe place. Roundup, being one of the most effective and profitable herbicides ever created, has been the focus of these cancer studying agencies time and time again. I know of few other chemical products that have been as deeply studies in search of something to condemn it as has Roundup. It is the herbicide that liberals love to hate. Now that scientific misconduct is routinely justified by the Left in their zeal to protect the planet for ourselves, they have now used this misconduct to label Roundup as a carcinogen. (As a research chemist of 35+ years of experience and more than my fair share of publications, I likely have a better grasp on this than most average citizens.)
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It was bad enough that the Left is lecturing us on free speech being violent speech and hate speech or any of their other absurd nihilism arguments, but now they are destroying the scientific method. Worse still, products like Roundup have been shown time and time again to be as safe as a product of this nature can be while helping farmers produce record crops that can go on and feed billions. By declaring Roundup a carcinogen they will be placing all sorts of limitations upon Roundup thereby limiting its use there by generating a negative effect upon crop yields, thereby causing unnecessary hunger in the world. Have these people no conscious in their zeal for their special agenda?
Monsanto can’t be trusted they lied about PCBs and paid for fake studies to say PCBs don’t cause cancer.
Roundup is used to dry wheat faster so it is sprayed on your wheat just prior to harvest. Every time you eat bread that is not organic you consume large amounts of RoundUp.
BS. PCBs don’t cause cancer. And there’s nothing wrong with eating Roundup, unless you’re a plant. It’s harmless to mammals.
” Every time you eat bread that is not organic you consume large amounts of RoundUp.”
And yet, millions of people every day eat bread that is not “organic” and the vast, vast majority of them don’t have cancer, and will not get cancer.
Nice way to prove your opponents point, while also proving that you do not have the ability to think logically. You just scored a “two-fer”.
p.s. not Organic? What kind of bread isn’t carbon based?
The only sandwich I can think of off the top of my head that would be inorganic would be made of, literally, sand.
Scientific illiteracy combined with Monsanto Derangement Syndrome is a sad thing.
The only inorganic things we eat are water and salt.