As news of Monsanto’s falling stock, and laid-off employees reaches the far stretches of the media circus, another dire report for the biotech company becomes common knowledge: glyphosate nearly doubles cancer risk.
One particular type of cancer stands above the rest, even after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said that glyphosate was probably carcinogenic. Glyphosate has been found to double the risk of the blood cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and increase the risk of a related cancer, multiple myeloma.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) points out that the IARC’s most recent report confirmed the findings of the Agency’s previous meta-analysis, which combined the results of several studies and concluded that farmers and others exposed to glyphosate suffer double the risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The more recent report also highlighted studies that found that farm workers’ glyphosate exposure increases their risk of multiple myeloma by 70 to 100%.
This doesn’t bode well for a company that is having trouble selling ‘suicide’ seeds, and has long lost public support for GM crops. The fact that farm workers should start looking for life insurance policies if they work with Monsanto’s chemicals is not only shocking, but it is entirely unnecessary. There are less-toxic, more sustainable ways of farming that have been around for centuries,; ones that biotech always attempts to discredit.
This should also be alarming to people who buy anything that isn’t organically-grown from US grocery store shelves. Some estimate that 90% of all processed food contains glyphosate residues. As a French court has found, this toxic chemical concoction certainly doesn’t ‘leave the soil clean’ or ‘biodegrade’ to become some inane, and innocuous magic soap scum that we can just wash away.
Glyphosate should be restricted or banned around the world.
