A recent study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of Glyphosate, a carcinogenic chemical found in herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup, in all urine samples tested. The amount of glyphosate found in the urine was staggering, with each sample containing concentrations at 5 to 20-fold the limit established for drinking water. This is just one more piece of evidence that herbicides are, at the very least, being sprayed out of control.
Glyphosate in Monsanto’s Roundup Impacting Global Health
This news comes only one month after it was found that glyphosate, contained in Monsanto’s Roundup, is contaminating the groundwater in the areas in which it is used. What does this mean? It means that toxic glyphosate is now polluting the world’s drinking water through the widespread contamination of aquifers, wells and springs. The recent reports of glyphosate showing up in all urine samples only enhances these past findings.
Monsanto continues to make the claim that their Roundup products are completely safe for both animals and humans. However many environmentalists, scientists, activists, and even doctors say otherwise. Glyphosate radically affects the metabolism of plants in a negative way. It is a systemic poison preventing the formation of essential amino acids, leading to weakened plants which ultimately die from it.
A formula seems to have been made to not only ruin the agricultural system, but also compromise the health of millions of people worldwide. With the invent of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops, resistant superweeds are taking over farmland and public health is being attacked. As it turns out, glyphosate is also leaving behind its residue on Roundup Ready crops, causing further potential concern for public health. Glyphosate is even contributing to escalating rates of mental illness and obesity through the depletion of beneficial gut flora that directly regulates these functions. But it certainly doesn’t stop there.
Researchers tested roundup on mature male rats at a concentration range between 1 and 10,000 parts per million (ppm), and found that within 1 to 48 hours of exposure, testicular cells of the mature rats were either damaged or killed. Even at a concentration of 1 ppm, the Roundup was able to affect the test subjects by decreasing their testosterone concentrations by as much as 35%.
Why Is Groundwater Contamination An Important Finding?
Groundwater is water located beneath the ground surface, that supplies aquifers, wells and springs. If a chemical like glyphosate is mobile enough to get into the groundwater and is intrinsically resistant to being biodegraded (after all, it is being used to kill/degrade living things – not the other way around), significant environmental exposures to humans using the water are inevitable.
Keep in mind that glyphosate is considered by the EPA as a Class III toxic substance, fatal to an adult at 30 grams, and has been linked to over 20 adverse health effects in the peer-reviewed, biomedical literature.
This groundwater contamination study adds to another highly concerning finding from March, published in the journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, where researchers found the chemical in 60-100% of all air and rain samples tested, indicating that glyphosate pollution and exposure is now omnipresent in the US. When simply breathing makes you susceptible to glyphosate exposure, we know we are dealing with a problem of unprecedented scale.
Who Is Responsible For The Groundwater Contamination?
Monsanto is a multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation, presently dominating the global genetically engineered seed market, with 90% market share in the US alone. It is also the world’s largest producer of the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as “Roundup,” among other brand names. If you are eating corn and soy, or any of their ten thousand plus byproducts – and it does not have a USDA organic logo – you are getting the Monsanto “double whammy”: the genetic modification (GM) of your health (and gene expression) that follows the consumption of GM food (because we are – literally – what we eat), and ceaseless chemical exposure to glyphosate, as all Monsanto-engineered foods have been designed to be glyphosate-resistant, and therefore are saturated with it.
Is Monsanto’s Herbicide A New Agent Orange?
Roundup is not Monsanto’s first entry into the systemic herbicide market. Monsanto admits it manufactured the herbicide/defoliant Agent Orange from 1965 to 1969, which Vietnam estimated killed and maimed 400,000 people and resulted in the 500,000 children being born with birth defects.
The true devastation caused by Agent Orange was covered up for many years. We may find that Monsanto’s Roundup, and its primary active ingredient glyphosate, may be causing a similar degree of devastation to both environmental and human health under the lidless, though not very watchful eye (as far as business interests are concerned), of our regulatory agencies.
Indeed, glyphosate is a powerful endocrine disrupter. Exceedingly small amounts are capable of mimicking and/or disrupting hormonal pathways, cell receptor sites and signaling. Research culled from The National Library of Medicine links it to 17 adverse pharmacological actions, including carcinogenicity, genotoxicity, neurotoxicty, hepatoxicity, and nephrotoxicity.
But what is most disturbing, and which may make its comparison to Agent Orange all the more appropriate, is its potential teratrogenicity, i.e. ability to cause fetal malformations.
A 2003 study of pregnant, glyphosate/Roundup-exposed rats indicated the formulation exhibited significant tetragenicity. The researchers commented: “We may conclude that glyphosate-Roundup is toxic to the dams and induces developmental retardation of the fetal skeleton.”
A study published in 2004 revealed that glyphosate exhibits endocrine-disruptive and embryotoxic effects. Researchers found the chemical alters the expression of the enzyme aromatase in both fetal and placental cells and tissue — changes which indicate it may contribute to birth defects and abnormal fetal development.
Another study published in 2009 showed that glyphosate formulations induce cell death and necrosis in human umbilicial, embryonic and placental cells.
Now that glyphosate has been found in the majority of air and rain samples tested in the US, and is now likely contaminating our wells, springs and aquifers, exposure is not only likely, its inevitable — the difference being only a matter of degree.
Eating, Breathing, Drinking … Dying?
The precautionary principle, which is not employed here in the US, would require that if a company produces a novel chemical compound like glyphosate, and would like to use it commercially, it would have to prove its safety to humans before it is released into the environment.
Animal and cell research clearly shows glyphosate is harmful, but because we use a “weight of evidence standard” in this country, the burden of proof that it is harmful to humans is actually on those being harmed by it.
Had Monsanto been required to prove its safety in humans, it is doubtful they would have been able to. There was already enough damning animal research available, and proving a toxic chemical in human studies would require harming them, which is unethical.
This is why the precautionary principle is so powerful and necessary to protect us from corporations like Monsanto. We would not be eating, drinking and breathing glyphosate today, if it had been employed earlier. Instead, chemical companies use animal experiments to determine a LD50 (the dose at which 50% of the animals die), from which an “acceptable level of harm” is extrapolated and applied to humans, in what is called a toxicological risk assessment.
An acceptable level of harm?
This way of thinking is abusive, especially when applied to the unborn and infants.
Will it take additional decades of cumulative “acceptable” exposures, and thousands of “mysterious” miscarriages, birth defects, and developmental problems for us to understand how serious the problem is? Or, should we listen to Monsanto, their scientists, and the governmental regulatory agencies that they populate with elected and unelected officials on their payroll, who say it is relatively harmless?
Will it take additional decades of cumulative “acceptable” exposures, and thousands of “mysterious” miscarriages, birth defects, and developmental problems for us to understand how serious the problem is? Or, should we listen to Monsanto, their scientists, and the governmental regulatory agencies that they populate with elected and unelected officials on their payroll, who say it is relatively harmless?
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