We’re the ‘Weeds’ for Monsanto Roundup Weed Killer

Column: Economics

Region: USA in the World

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to kill you.” Such a comment might be applied to the most widely used weed-killers on Earth–Monsanto’s patented Roundup based on the systemic herbicide, Glyphosate. Earlier this year the authoritative International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World health Organisation (WHO) declared that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans. Scientific studies have confirmed it. Now a new, peer-reviewed scientific study over a two-year life span of test rats, clearly demonstrates that consumption of even tiny amounts of Roundup or other glyphosate-containing weed killers produces severe liver and kidney damage and in some cases premature death.

The well-meaning faceless bureaucrats over at the supra-national EU Commission in Brussels refuse to even seriously consider such studies and classify as “secret” a German government report from this past January because it likely would show Monsanto’s dirty paw prints. All this does is once more show the criminal conspiracy by Monsanto, the world’s leading purveyor of Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO plants to use myths, lies and any sort of corruption of science to ram their poisons down the throats of our food animals and of us human beings.

Shocking new Study

On August 25, the international scientific journal, Environmental Health, published the peer-reviewed results of a two-year study by a team led by Michael N. Antoniou of the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics, King’s College London. He conceived the study together with Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini of the Institute of Biology, University of Caen, in France.

Under strictest conditions the different groups of rats were given micro-diluted concentrations of glyphosate and its adjuvants as found in Roundup from Monsanto. The glyphosate equivalent dose of Roundup administered in this study was half that permitted in drinking water in the European Union and Australia, and 14,000 times lower than that permitted in drinking water in the USA.

Moreover, the amount of glyphosate-equivalent Roundup consumed by the animals on a daily basis was many thousands of times below the regulatory set safety limits of glyphosate alone in all regions around the world.

This is the most extensive and only known long-term study of the potential toxic effects of glyphosate-based herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup, even though Roundup with glyphosate was discovered by Monsanto in 1970.

Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) such as Roundup are the major pesticides used worldwide and are currently applied on at least 24 % of the total global cropland. They are also used extensively in domestic and urban environments. Residues of GBH are routinely detected in foodstuffs and drinking water contaminated via rain, surface runoff and leaching into groundwater. In short it’s almost everywhere.

What the scientists discovered should set alarm bells ringing around the world. Have you heard even so much as a jingle bell so far?

They discovered that male animals suffered from pathological liver and kidney damage resulting in an increased rate of premature deaths. Further, significant alteration in the pattern of gene function was found in both the liver and kidneys of the Roundup group of rats compared with the control group. The alterations in gene function were consistent with fibrosis (scarring), necrosis (areas of dead tissue), phospholipidosis (disturbed fat metabolism) and damage to mitochondria (the centres of respiration in cells).

I want to underscore the seriousness of what Antoniou and his colleagues are describing. The liver is a vital organ. It has some 500 functions in the body including detoxification of various metabolites, protein synthesis, and the production of biochemicals necessary for digestion. This gland plays a major role in metabolism. It regulates a variety of essential reactions, including the synthesis and breakdown of small and complex molecules which are necessary for normal vital functions. In short, the liver supports almost every organ in the body and is vital for survival. 

And we should also be clear on the role of other glyphosate-damaged organ, the kidneys, which are essential for the body’s removal of waste products of metabolism. Kidneys are essential to the urinary system and also the regulation of electrolytes, maintenance of acid–base balance, and regulation of blood pressure by maintaining the salt and water balance. They are the body’s natural filter of the blood, and remove water-soluble wastes which are diverted to the bladder.  If both kidneys and liver are damaged seriously, we are in bad trouble, or even dead.

To sum up the Antoniou and Seralini team’s rat research results, rats fed ultra-low concentrations of glyphosate-based Roundup over the two year life-span period showed that, “twice the number of biochemical parameters was disturbed in kidney than what can be expected by chance. Furthermore, a testosterone/estrogen imbalance was evident with testosterone serum levels significantly increased by 97 % by comparison to controls, while estradiol serum levels were decreased by 26 %. These observations together with pituitary gland disturbances suggest endocrine disrupting effects.” Estradiol is a steroid and estrogen sex hormone, and the primary female sex hormone. It is essential for the development and maintenance of female reproductive tissues but also has important effects in many other tissues including bone. Estrogens have essential functions in men as well.

The scientists continue their conclusions: “Overall, toxicity process analysis revealed gene expression disturbances associated with apoptosis, necrosis, phospholipidosis, mitochondrial membrane dysfunction and ischemia. Thus the alteration…in this study correlates with the observed increased signs of anatomical and functional pathology of the liver and kidneys.” They observed “more than 4000 genes whose expression was altered in both the liver and kidneys within the Roundup treatment group.”

Monsanto and corrupt scientists

Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini designed this newest study with his colleagues as a follow-up to a sensational 2012 study. The new study was specifically on the impact, not of feeding Roundup-sprayed GMO corn from Monsanto, but solely the isolated impact of Roundup, the glyphosate-based Roundup weed-killer used in all GMO crops today. In September 2012 Food and Chemical Toxicology, published Seralini’s first ever-long-term two year study of the impact of Monsanto GMO corn sprayed, as Monsanto requires, with Monsanto’s Roundup weed-killer.

That 2012 Seralini report described the world’s first feeding study of the effects on more than 200 rats of a diet of GMO corn over a period of a full two years at a cost of €3 million.  The study found alarming instances of cancer tumors in rats fed GMO corn treated with Monsanto Roundup with Glyphosate. World media coverage forced the EU Commission to cover its pro-GMO tracks.

More than one year later, in 2013, in an unprecedented and entirely unethical move, the Food and Chemical Toxicology editors retracted the Seralini 2012 article. It was later discovered that a former senior Monsanto employee, Richard Goodman, had been named by the journal to their Editorial Board shortly before the Seralini study was retracted. A year after that blatantly corrupt action, Goodman along with Editor-in-chief A. Wallace Hayes were themselves both “removed” by the publisher. 

But the corruption doesn’t stop with the attempts to ostracise the Seralini rat studies.

EU Declares German Monsanto study “Secret”

In the latest twist in this criminal drama of lies and intrigues the EU Commission has just declared a German government study “secret” and unavailable for examination by independent scientific experts.

The EU Commission is refusing to let independent experts have access to the recent report prepared by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) on the risk assessment of glyphosate.

On August 10, 2015 the EU Commission wrote to Testbiotech.org, an industry-independent group of experts registered as a non-profit organization to promote independent research and public debate on the impacts of biotechnology, a euphemism for GMO.

The EU Commission wrote that it had denied a request by Testbiotech to examine the documents made available to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) by the German government. The EU insisted, bizarrely, that the documents “are protected in their entirety” as confidential. The EU Commission can see “no overriding public interest” that would justify access. The letter was signed by Ladislav Miko, Acting Director-General of the EU Commission’s Food Safety Directorate (the name of the EU office even sounds like 1984). Miko is another of those Brussels faceless bureaucrats with immense responsibility and no transparency.

At issue is a report sent to the EU Commission’s Monsanto-linked EFSA, (European Food Safety Authority), this spring by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) on the safety of glyphosate. The German assessment was made following widespread publicity about the WHO assessment that glyphosate was a likely cancer causing chemical. Surprisingly, the BfR came to the opposite conclusion, namely that there is no risk of cancer from glyphosates. Theirs was in a hasty study that apparently relied on an equally hasty study provided to the German government by…you guessed it–Monsanto scientists. That Monsanto study that formed the basis of the cheery German BfR report is what the scientific experts of Testbiotech.org wish to put under the microscope. To avoid that potential embarrassment, the EU Commission has labeled the German study “secret and confidential.” The German government has also kept their report secret.

The criminal melodrama gets even more remarkable though.

In a 2013 court ruling made by the European Court of Justice, (Case T 545/11), judges ruled that data relevant for the risk assessment of herbicides have to be made public. The EU Commission as well as the German government are in contempt of that ruling.

Whatever Monsanto touches seems to ooze with corruption and fraud. It’s interesting and extraordinary in its pervasiveness, and suggests the company has a deeper agenda than mere corporate profit. I would posit that the deeper Monsanto agenda has something to do with the company’s long history with the pro-eugenics Rockefeller family and more recently with eugenicist advocate, Bill Gates of Microsoft.

Is the entire GMO project, a project financed and brought to commercialization primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation, a hidden eugenics project to gradually reduce world population of what Rockefeller and his kind would call “useless eaters” or human “weeds”? It’s beginning to look more and more just like that. What an elegant way to get hundreds of millions or even a few billions of people to have them slowly eat themselves to death by consuming GMO and glyphosates they don’t even notice until it’s too late. Especially Asians, Africans, all non-Anglo-Saxons. But that is really ridiculous now, isn’t it?“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to kill you.”

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/11/06/we-re-the-weeds-for-monsanto-roundup-weed-killer/