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vinayv224 · 6 years ago

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But it’s not clear how much influence social media has over parents refusing vaccines for their kids.

A teenager who disobeyed his anti-vaccine mother and decided to get immunized against her wishes told Congress Tuesday that Facebook was a key source of misinformation in his household.

Sen. Isakson: Does your mother get most of her info online? Ethan Lindenberger, 18-year-old who got vaccinated against his mom's wishes: "Yes... Mainly Facebook." Isakson: Where do you get your info? Lindenberger: "Not Facebook. CDC, the World Health Org...accredited sources." pic.twitter.com/9iMnC8AetM

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 5, 2019

“With my mother, it continues to influence her views, along with countless Americans,” said Ethan Lindenberger, an Ohio high schooler, who went to his local health department in December to get a range of shots, including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, and HPV, according to the Washington Post.

Lindenberger was invited to speak alongside state health officials and vaccine experts at a Senate committee hearing focused on what’s causing vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. The hearing was called amid a major measles outbreak in Washington state.

The teenage vaccine advocate was describing what’s become a familiar issue on Facebook: groups using the site to try to convince parents not to vaccinate, or to delay vaccinating, their children. Even Pinterest, typically a place for home and wedding inspiration, has housed viral anti-vaccination memes.

Lately, these giant social platforms have been getting more heat for housing this content. And in recent weeks, several companies have gone public about measures to block and minimize anti-vaccine misinformation.

On Thuraday, Facebook announced it’ll seek out and limit the spread of anti-vaccine hoaxes on its network, and also stop showing pages and groups featuring anti-vaccine content or suggesting users join them.

YouTube also announced it’s no longer allowing users to monetize anti-vaccine videos with ads, in the hopes that that will disincentivize the people who create them.

Even anti-vaccine news on Pinterest is being made less prominent: Since September, the network has barred searches for any vaccine content, recognizing that its vast user base of moms was accessing misinformation on the platform. (The effort became public on February 20, when the Wall Street Journal first reported on it.)

These moves are encouraging for one reason: As Lindenberger points out, misinformation about vaccines can be dangerous. A crackdown by some of the world’s tech giants, which all have millions of users, might mean fewer people are exposed to anti-vax information, and maybe fewer parents will decide to shirk lifesaving shots for their kids.

But it’s probably unrealistic to expect that YouTube or Pinterest will eliminate anti-vaccine sentiment, and there are reasons to be skeptical of their approaches. While it’s popular to blame Facebook and its ilk for every social evil, it’s not actually clear that these platforms are emboldening vaccine denialism in a significant way. And there are better — proven — ways to boost immunization rates. But they involve more systemic fixes than just stamping out erroneous pins and Facebook posts. Here’s why.

Social media may not be a major contributor to the anti-vax problem

In order for immunizations to prevent diseases and protect people who can’t be immunized (such as newborn babies), we need a certain threshold of the population to be vaccinated to achieve what’s known as “herd immunity.” For a super-contagious virus like measles, nearly everybody who can get immunized needs to be.

When that threshold drops, vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks are inevitable — and we know vaccine refusers have helped spark recent outbreaks. But what we don’t know is how much misinformation on social media is truly fueling vaccine skepticism, and whether it’s changing people’s behaviors and causing them to turn away from immunizations.

“The conversation around vaccines emphasizes social media more than the evidence can support,” said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan who studies vaccine misinformation. “Would parents come up with some other reason not to vaccinate their kids [without misinformation on social media]? We don’t know.”

That’s because the major social platforms — including Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest — won’t share their user and engagement data with independent researchers. So researchers like Nyhan haven’t been able to study the link between exposure to fake vaccine news online and changes in people’s vaccine-seeking behavior.

At the Atlantic, journalist Alexis Madrigal found a clever workaround — and discovered that the “actual universe of people arguing about vaccinations [on Facebook] is limited and knowable.” Using the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle, Madrigal analyzed Facebook’s most popular vaccine posts since 2016 and discovered it’s actually a small cluster of pages that generates most of the vaccine misinformation. Also, science-based pages are just as likely to go viral. Here’s Madrigal:

While there is no dearth of posts related to vaccines, the top 50 Facebook pages ranked by the number of public posts they made about vaccines generated nearly half (46 percent) of the top 10,000 posts for or against vaccinations, as well as 38 percent of the total likes on those posts, from January 2016 to February of this year. The distribution is heavy on the top, particularly for the anti-vax position. Just seven anti-vax pages generated nearly 20 percent of the top 10,000 vaccination posts in this time period: Natural News, Dr. Tenpenny on Vaccines and Current Events, Stop Mandatory Vaccination, March Against Monsanto, J. B. Handley, Erin at Health Nut News, and Revolution for Choice.

So it’s possible that anti-vax content may not be the major contributor to vaccine hesitancy that we think it is. And if that’s true, stamping out fake vaccine news won’t have much of an impact on vaccination rates.

The anti-vaccine empire is much broader than social media

There’s also the off-platform anti-vaccine information to deal with — what Baylor College of Medicine infectious diseases researcher Peter Hotez calls “the anti-vaccine media empire.” It consists of nearly 500 anti-vaccine websites, according to a recent estimate. “Then you have the books and documentaries,” Hotez added.

The anti-vaccine film Vaxxed, directed by the discredited vaccine-autism fearmongerer Andrew Wakefield, got outsize attention when Robert De Niro touted it at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. Now Vaxxed: II, the sequel, will be coming out soon.

These films and popular books have helped fan the flames of vaccine hesitancy. Parents who’ve decided to delay and avoid vaccines told me they were persuaded by Vaxxed, as well as The Vaccine Book, which suggests parents create their own selective vaccine schedule and consider skipping some shots. The Vaccine Book and other skeptical tomes (such as Vaccines: A Reappraisal) also happen to rank among Amazon’s best-selling books on vaccines.

So while Facebook or Pinterest might help amplify anti-vaccine information, Hotez said, cracking down on these platforms doesn’t address all the other ways people are accessing false vaccine content.

Hotez would like to see Amazon hire a chief science officer to vet books for their potential public health impact. He’d like to see Google and other search engines address how vaccine information shows up in searches. He’d also like more pro-vaccine advocacy on the part of government — something that isn’t happening at scale right now.

“We’re not hearing from the usual champions of public health — the CDC, the surgeon general — on the vaccine issue,” Hotez said. “We need a comprehensive public-private partnership between the US government and all the major stakeholders — Facebook, Amazon, Google — to look at dismantling the anti-vaccine empire.”

At the Senate hearing, John Wiesman, Washington state’s health secretary, had a similar message. “We don’t have anything to counter the media of a very well-organized and connected group of a small number of folks who are having a huge impact,” he told the Washington Post.

The moves by the tech giants are also one-offs that can’t scale, Nyhan noted, since they “require manual interventions and subjective judgments.”

So what can scale? Public policy.

We can’t prevent outbreaks until we have public policy that closes vaccine loopholes

Right now, many states make it way too easy for parents to opt out of vaccines on behalf of their children. As I recently wrote, even though all 50 states have legislation requiring vaccines for students entering school, almost every state allows exemptions for people with religious beliefs against immunizations, and 17 states grant philosophical exemptions for those opposed to vaccines because of personal or moral beliefs. (The exceptions are Mississippi, California, and West Virginia, which allow only medical exemptions.)

Getting a lifetime exemption for a child can be as easy as writing a letter and having it notarized. And if that’s too much trouble, there are other loopholes one can take advantage of. For example, in 45 states, even without an exemption, kids can be granted “conditional entrance” to school on the promise that they will be vaccinated, but schools don’t always bother to follow up.

We have plenty of evidence, spanning more than a decade, showing that when you make it easier for parents to opt out of their shots, the rates of vaccine exemptions tend to be higher. The most recent analysis of US vaccine policies, published in 2018, found that states allowing both religious and philosophical exemptions — as 17 states currently do — were associated with a 2.3 percent decrease in measles-mumps-rubella vaccine rates and a 1.5 percent increase in both total exemptions and nonmedical exemptions.

Mississippi and West Virginia — which have long had the strictest vaccine laws in the nation — also have among the highest vaccine rates. In California, which barred nonmedical exemptions in 2015 and closed its “conditional entrance” loophole, vaccine coverage rates have been going up.

For now, the percentage of people seeking nonmedical exemptions in the US has been creeping upward, from 1.1 percent in 2009-’10 to 2.2 percent by 2017-’18. It’s still a minority of people who skip vaccines — but that average hides clusters across the country where nearly 30 percent of parents are opting out of vaccines. When someone brings a vaccine-preventable disease into those communities, we’ve seen devastating results: outbreaks that put public health at risk, cost millions of dollars to stamp out, and distract from other important public health programs.

The new actions by big tech could have some positive influence. But we have no evidence that they will. The solution to sustaining vaccination rates has to encompass more than social media — it has to be a priority for state governments around the country. If we want to stop vaccine-preventable outbreaks, we probably need something mightier than even Facebook. We need to close states’ vaccine loopholes.

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slrmagazine · 9 months ago

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lindamcsherry · 6 years ago

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Roundup Lawsuit Blames Cancer On Visits To City Parks Sprayed With The Weedkiller

A Washington state woman indicates that she developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from Roundup weedkiller applications in a park near her home, indicating that Monsanto has withheld information about the potential cancer risks associated with their product for decades.

The complaint (PDF) was filed last week by Brandy Rhodes, of Vancouver, Washington, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Monsanto currently faces nearly 10,000 similar Roundup lawsuits being pursued by individuals nationwide, but nearly all of the other cases involve claims brought by agricultural workers, farmers, landscapers, groundskeepers and other consumers who directly sprayed the weedkiller. Rhodes indicates that she developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma from secondary exposure to Roundup sprayed near her home.

“Ms. Rhodes was exposed to Roundup for approximately six years while residing in La Center, Washington. The city of La Center routinely applied Roundup to the parks and greenery near Ms. Rhodes’ residence and the parks she visited with her children,” the lawsuit states. “In or about December, 2005, Ms. Rhodes was diagnosed with Stage IIA Nodular Sclerosing Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.”

The circumstances highlight growing concerns in a number of cities and communities that have liberally applied Roundup for years. Amid recent concerns that Monsanto’s herbicide is a human carcinogen, a number of municipalities have banned use of Roundup in parks, school grounds and other areas.

Although Monsanto has previously indicated that Roundup is safe, the World Health Organization’s International Agency on Research for Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, to be a probable human carcinogen in 2015.

Roundup bans have been enacted or are under consideration in communities in California, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Maryland, with dozens of other governments considering similar action nationwide. In addition, several countries outside the U.S. have already taken steps to prevent or reduce use of the glyphosate-based weedkiller.

Roundup Lawsuits

According to allegations raised in Rhodes’ complaint and other lawsuits pending nationwide, Monsanto knew or should have known that exposure to Roundup weedkiller applications was inherently dangerous and unsafe, yet concealed information from consumers and federal regulators.

Given common questions of fact and law raised in the lawsuits, a number of “bellwether” trials are set to go before juries this year, to help the parties gauge how juries are likely to respond to certain evidence and testimony likely to be repeated throughout the litigation.

In August 2018, the first trial in the country resulted in a $78 million judgment for a former California school groundskeeper, who was granted an early trial date because he is dying from non-Hodgkins lymohoma.

In the federal court system, where all claims have been centralized as part of a multidistrict litigation (MDL) before U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California, a series of early trial dates are set to begin later this month. In addition, more than a dozen other claims are set to go to trial in California and Missouri state court throughout 2019.

While the outcomes of these bellwether trials are not binding on Alexy and other plaintiffs, if Monsanto fails to reach Roundup settlements or otherwise resolve the litigation, hundreds of individual cases may be set for trial in the coming years.

The post Roundup Lawsuit Blames Cancer On Visits To City Parks Sprayed With The Weedkiller appeared first on AboutLawsuits.com.

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healthspiritbody · 6 years ago

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'Cancer-Causing' Weed Killer Found In Dozens More Breakfast Cereals

Dozens of cereals, oatmeals and snack bars contain trace amounts of a weed killer that has been linked to cancer, a new report says.

Released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the report found 26 of 28 oat-based cereal products that were tested had ‘harmful’ levels of glyphosate, the main ingredient of Roundup.

Products included variations of Cheerios and Quaker Oats, including Honey Nut Cheerios, Quaker Oatmeal Squares Honey Nut, and Quaker Overnight Oats.

The weed killer was recently at the center of a trial in which a California jury found Roundup was responsible for giving groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, 46, terminal cancer.

None of the products in the new report had levels above what is allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but the EWG argues that customers should be concerned that any levels are being detected in products consumed by children every day.

Dozens of cereals, oatmeals and snack bars, including Honey Nut Cheerios (left) and Quaker Oatmeal Squares Honey Nut (right), contain trace amounts of a weed killer linked to cancer

The report from the Environmental Working Group found 26 of 28 oat-based cereal products that were tested had levels of glyphosate, the main ingredient of Roundup (pictured)

In August, the EWG conducted its first study, which found the presence of glyphosate in 45 samples of breakfast cereals from producers Quakers, Kellogg’s, and General Mills.

On the heels of this study, the group wanted to dive further and test specifically Quaker Oats and Cheerios products, because high levels of glyphosate were found in the first study and they are two of the most popular cereal brands.

For the new study, the EWG purchased the products at grocery stores in San Francisco and Washington, DC, and had them tested at Anresco Laboratories in San Francisco.

Results of the samples showed glyphosate was detectable in all 28 products, and levels considered unsafe were found in 26.

The EPA caps glyphosate tolerance at 5.0 parts per million (ppm).

But the EWG’s health benchmark is much more conservative and says any level greater than 160 parts per billion (ppb) is not safe.

In the report, the highest level was found Quaker Oatmeal Squares Cereal Honey Nut, registering at 2,837 ppb.

That number is nearly 18 times greater than EWG’s benchmark.

However, government agencies, manufacturers and advocacy groups seem to be conflicted about what is – and is not – considered safe.

Following the results of the EWG’s report, both General Mills and Quaker released statements insisting their products are safe.

‘[The] EWG report artificially creates a “safe level” for glyphosate that is detached from those that have been established by responsible regulatory bodies in an effort to grab headlines,’ a statement from Quaker, sent to Daily Mail Online, read in part.

‘We believe EWG’s approach is invalid, and we stand behind our statement that the Quaker products tested by EWG are safe.’

General Mills, the makers of Cheerios, also cited the group’s benchmark, telling CNN: ‘The extremely low levels of pesticide residue cited in recent news reports is a tiny fraction of the amount the government allows.’

The EPA itself released a statement saying the report should not leave consumers concerned.

But Dr. Alexis Temkin, a toxicologist at the EWG who worked on the report, says the results are disconcerting.

‘Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s safe or that it provides that extra level of protection for children,’ she told Daily Mail Online.

She mentioned that the EPA increased the amounts of glyphosate residue allowed on oats from 20 ppm in 1997 to 30 ppm in 2008.

‘The EPA likely saw it was increasingly being used as a pre-harvest desiccant (the application of an herbicide crop shortly before harvest) and increased the limit to allow it to be legal,’ Dr. Temkin said.

In August, a California jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289million to groundsman Dewayne Johnson, 46 (pictured), who claimed the weed killer is responsible for giving him cancer

None of the products tested had levels above what is allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Pictured: Johnson’s hand covered in lesions

Glyphosate-based products are sold in more than 160 countries, and farmers use it on 250 types of crops in California alone, which is the leading farming state in the US.

In March 2015, the World Health Organization found that that the herbicide is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’.

Then, in 2017, California named glyphosate an ingredient that causes cancer under the state’s Proposition 65, which requires Roundup to carry a warning label if sold in California.

Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, says glyphosate is safe and that its product has undergone stringent testing.

However, in August, a California jury ordered the company to pay $289 million to a groundsman who claimed the weed killer is responsible for giving him cancer.

A judge upheld the verdict on Monday but reduced Monsanto’s payout to Dewayne Johnson to $78million.

‘The report shows that breakfast cereals are not a place for pesticides linked to cancer,’ said Dr. Temkin.

‘What we show here is that there are detectable levels in common foods that children exposed to every day. Over a long period of time, that can be dangerous.’

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‘Cancer-Causing’ Weed Killer Found In Dozens More Breakfast Cereals was originally published on Health Spirit Body

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shrbt · 6 years ago

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kansascityhappenings · 6 years ago

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Dozens more breakfast foods test positive for trace amounts of weed killer, report says

Dozens of common breakfast cereals and snack bars have trace amounts of a controversial herbicide found in the weed killer Roundup, according to a report released today by an environmental advocacy group.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that 26 of the 28 products it tested had levels of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that were “higher than what EWG scientists consider protective of children’s health.” An earlier report found similar results in over thirty oat-based foods.

Manufacturers say their products are safe, but the EWG report argues that the vast majority of foods tested — such as Honey Nut Cheerios and Quaker Simply Granola Oats — have glyphosate levels that might pose a cancer risk with long-term consumption.

None of the foods violated EPA limits on the herbicide, but the EWG uses a far more conservative health benchmark. California’s proposed glyphosate limit, which would be the most restrictive in the country, still allows for glyphosate levels that are over a hundred times higher than the EWG’s threshold.

The environmental group says its lower threshold includes an added buffer for children, as “exposure during early life can have more significant effects on development later in life,” according to Dr. Alexis Temkin, the lead scientist on EWG report.

But manufacturers dispute that threshold. Quaker said in a statement that the “EWG report artificially creates a ‘safe level’ for glyphosate that is detached from those that have been established by responsible regulatory bodies in an effort to grab headlines.”

General Mills, whose products were also cited in the report, maintained that glyphosate levels in its foods do not pose any health risks. “The extremely low levels of pesticide residue cited in recent news reports is a tiny fraction of the amount the government allows,” the company said in statement to CNN.

“Consumers are regularly bombarded with alarming headlines, but rarely have the time to weigh the information for themselves,” the company said. “We feel this is important context that consumers should be aware of when considering this topic.”

Herbicide manufacturer ordered to pay $78 million to cancer victim

In August, a jury in San Francisco ordered Roundup’s manufacturer, Monsanto, to pay $289 million in damages to a school groundskeeper who argued that the glyphosate-based weed killer caused his cancer. A judge on Monday upheld that decision but slashed Monsanto’s payout to $78 million.

Pharmaceutical giant Bayer recently purchased Monsanto and said in a statement that the company plans to appeal the court’s decision. “Glyphosate-based herbicides have been used safely and successfully for over four decades worldwide,” the company said in a statement to CNN.

“There is an extensive body of research on glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides, including more than 800 rigorous registration studies required by EPA, European and other regulators, that confirms that these products are safe when used as directed.”

The EPA concluded in 2017 that glyphosate “is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” but a World Health Organization agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), determined in 2015 that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Dr. Chensheng Lu, an associate professor of environmental exposure biology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, defended the WHO group, calling it “a world renowned and reputable academic and research institute in cancer epidemiology.”

The EPA, in contrast, “is a regulatory agency, and in many ways a political agency,” he said. “In 2018, I would not hold EPA’s view on glyphosate as a fact.”

Confusion abounds over glyphosate cancer risk

The IARC has vigorously defended its finding, but a separate WHO panel assessing pesticide residues determined in 2016 that “glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet,” adding to a dizzying array of contradictory findings.

Puzzling conclusions like those are not uncommon in cancer research, according to Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical and scientific officer.

“IARC, I think, is very, very reasonable in their assessments,” he said, “but IARC will sometimes make an assessment that is not satisfying to many of us.”

Brawley noted that the other commonly-consumed substances are also classified as potentially carcinogenic by the IARC. Based on limited evidence, for example, the IARC says that “drinking very hot beverages probably causes cancer of the esophagus in humans,” yet hundreds of millions of people drink coffee every day.

“There are some groups that really want to alarm people and advocate for what’s called the precautionary principle,” Brawley said. “The precautionary principle, taken to its extreme, means you literally wouldn’t get up in the morning.”

Brawley said that parents should instead make sure their kids are eating fruits, vegetables, and getting the nutrition they need. More children “are definitely going to be harmed by inappropriate diets,” he said, “than by a small amount of glyphosate in their oatmeal.”

How much glyphosate is too much?

Glyphosate can make its way into processed foods after being used on farms that grow oats. “Most crops grown in fields use some form of pesticides and trace amounts are found in the majority of food we all eat,” said General Mills in a statement.

“We continue to work closely with farmers, our suppliers and conservation organizations to minimize the use of pesticides on the ingredients we use in our foods,” the company said.

Still, some experts are urging parents to be vigilant. “I think it’s very important for people to realize how widespread exposure to glyphosate is,” said Dr. Sarah Evans, an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“There are things in the foods that they purchase that aren’t listed on the label and that they probably don’t want to be giving to their children,” said Evans, who also works at Mount Sinai’s Children’s Environmental Health Center.

“I don’t think that people should become hysterical,” she said, “but people need to be really aware of where their food is coming from and what’s getting into their foods.”

And when dealing with children, Harvard’s Lu believes that parents should err on the side of caution. “What is more scary?” he asked. “Choosing cereals between organic and conventional, or being told by your doctor that you or your children have cancer?”

The EWG’s earlier report found glyphosate in 5 of the 16 organic breakfast samples they tested, but none of those levels exceeded the group’s health benchmark. Temkin, who was also lead author on that report, said that parents don’t need to “throw out their half-eaten box of cheerios” just yet.

“We are talking about lifetime cumulative exposure,” she said. “But if you do want to reduce your risk, we do know that organic oats and organic cereals are a better option.”

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2018/10/24/dozens-more-breakfast-foods-test-positive-for-trace-amounts-of-weed-killer-report-says/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/dozens-more-breakfast-foods-test-positive-for-trace-amounts-of-weed-killer-report-says/

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jakehglover · 6 years ago

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Petition to Stop Weedkiller in Cereal

By Dr. Mercola

Most of the more than 250 million pounds of glyphosate sprayed on U.S. crops annually is used on genetically engineered (GE) crops,1 like Roundup Ready corn and soybeans that are engineered to withstand the chemical’s otherwise lethal effects. (Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide.)

Lesser known is the fact that glyphosate is also used by farmers as a desiccant. About two weeks prior to harvest of grain crops like wheat, oats and barley, glyphosate is sprayed onto the crop, which accelerates the drying process, allowing for earlier harvest.

The benefits of using glyphosate are clear for the farmer. It may allow them to complete their harvest before wet weather comes and, by drying out the grain, it may reap them a higher profit, as the greater the moisture content of the grain at sale, the lower the price they get.

The consequences of this shortsighted practice are steep for everyone else, unfortunately. It’s likely that applying this toxic chemical to crops so soon before harvest is one reason why levels of glyphosate have been rising in humans, and a petition has been launched to try and stop the destructive practice.

Consumer Groups Call for End to Preharvest Glyphosate Spraying

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), along with MegaFood, Ben & Jerry’s, Stonyfield Farm, MOM’s Organic Market, Nature’s Path, Happy Family Organics and other consumer groups, has petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce the amount of glyphosate residues allowed in oats from 30 parts per million (ppm) to 0.1 ppm, as well as prohibit the use of glyphosate as a preharvest desiccant.2

The 0.1 ppm limit for glyphosate on oats was actually the legal limit in 1993 — it has since been raised 300-fold, in response to a petition from Monsanto around the time farmers began to widely use glyphosate as a desiccant late in the season.3

Speaking to Sustainable Pulse, Scott Faber, EWG’s senior vice president for government affairs, said, “No parent should worry whether feeding their children healthy oat-based foods will also expose them to a chemical linked to cancer. Using glyphosate as a desiccant is not necessary, but only a convenience for growers. That’s not worth taking a chance with our children’s health.”4

As it stands, neither the EPA nor the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) monitors for glyphosate levels on most food crops, even as studies suggest Americans’ exposure levels are increasing.

Is Glyphosate Preharvest Spraying Responsible for Rising Glyphosate Levels in Americans?

Researchers from University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine tested urine levels of glyphosate and its metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) among 100 people living in Southern California over a period of 23 years — from 1993 to 2016.5

At the start of the study, very few of the participants had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine but, by 2000, 30 percent of them did, rising to 70 percent by 2016.6 Overall, the prevalence of human exposure to glyphosate increased by 500 percent during the study period while actual levels of the chemical, in ug/ml, increased by a shocking 1,208 percent.7

In an analysis for Environmental Health News, Richard Jackson, professor at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, and Charles Benbrook, a visiting scholar in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, asked the question of why levels are increasing so dramatically.

The planting of Roundup Ready crops can’t explain the rise on their own, as they were already being widely used by 2004 to 2005, with only modest increases in glyphosate use since 2005. “The likely answer lies elsewhere,” they stated, with preharvest spraying of glyphosate:8

“Around 2002, farmers in the U.S. started adopting preharvest, desiccation uses of Roundup … Such ‘harvest aid’ uses of glyphosate entail spraying fields about two weeks prior to harvest … But spraying a mature grain or bean crop so close to harvest with a glyphosate-based herbicide results in much higher residues than traditional, spring or early summer applications.

Beginning around 2004 and over about the next decade, incrementally more acres were sprayed to speed up harvest in the U.S. It is nearly certain that residues from these applications were largely responsible for doubling the levels of glyphosate and its metabolite found in the urine of Rancho Bernado residents.”

Olga Naidenko, EWG’s senior science adviser for children's health, told CNN, "We know it is possible to grow oats and other grains without herbicides. Companies do not need to wait for EPA; they can simply talk to their suppliers and say, 'please grow our oats without glyphosate, because our customers are complaining.'"

EWG toxicologist Alexis Temkin added, "This type of use of glyphosate is a very small percentage of the overall use, yet it can have the greatest impact on human health, so we think this is the place to target reducing the use of glyphosate.”9

How Much Glyphosate Is in Your Favorite Foods?

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) commissioned independent laboratory tests to determine how much glyphosate is lurking in the U.S. food supply. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been testing foods for glyphosate, and tests reportedly revealed “a fair amount” of residues, their findings have not yet been made public.10

EWG’s testing revealed, however, that 43 out of 45 food products made with conventionally grown oats tested positive for glyphosate, 31 of which had glyphosate levels higher than EWG scientists believe would be protective of children’s health.

Examples of foods with detectable levels of glyphosate include Quaker Dinosaur Eggs instant oatmeal, Cheerios cereal, Nature Valley granola bars, Quaker steel cut oats and Back to Nature Classic Granola. Further, out of 16 organic oat foods tested, five contained glyphosate, although at levels below EWG’s health benchmark of 160 parts per billion (ppb).

In 2016, tests conducted by the nonprofit organizations Food Democracy Now! and The Detox Project also found glyphosate residues in a variety of foods including Doritos, Oreos and Stacy’s Pita Chips.11

Glyphosate has even been detected in PediaSure Enteral Formula nutritional drink, which is given to infants and children via feeding tubes. Thirty percent of the samples tested contained levels of glyphosate over 75 ppb — far higher levels than have been found to destroy gut bacteria in chickens (0.1 ppb).12 Where else might you find glyphosate in your favorite foods?

As the most widely used pesticide in the world,13 you can guess that it’s showing up virtually everywhere. Advocacy group Moms Across America sent 10 wine samples to be tested for glyphosate, and all of them tested positive — even organic wines, although their levels were significantly lower.14 A study of glyphosate residues by the Munich Environmental Institute even found glyphosate in 14 best-selling German beers.15

Glyphosate Deemed a Probable Carcinogen

The prevalence of glyphosate in the food supply is alarming because of the many health risks it’s been linked to. Food companies like Quaker have stated that any levels of glyphosate that remain in food products are significantly below any limits set by the EPA,16 but this doesn’t necessarily make them safe.

“Small doses over large populations do have effects — we have learned this from radiation exposures, lead and other environmental pollutants, including pesticides,” Jackson and Benbrook said.17 Daily exposure to ultralow levels of glyphosate for two years led to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in rats,18 for instance.

In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is the research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), also determined glyphosate to be a "probable carcinogen" (Class 2A). This determination was based on evidence showing it can cause Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and lung cancer in humans, along with "convincing evidence" it can also cause cancer in animals.

California's Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) also announced in 2015 that they intended to list glyphosate as a chemical known to cause cancer under Proposition 65, which requires consumer products with potential cancer-causing ingredients to bear warning labels.

In contrast, the EPA has stated glyphosate is probably not carcinogenic to humans, but internal documents have revealed the agency has colluded with Monsanto to protect the company’s interests.

Children May Be Most at Risk From Glyphosate Residues in Oats

A primary reason why the EWG petition is calling for glyphosate levels in oats to be limited to 0.1 ppm as they were in 1993 is because children consume a sizable number of oat products in the U.S. (cereal, cookies, breakfast bars, oatmeal and more).

Not only do EWG’s studies suggest that glyphosate levels may be higher in oat products than they are in even wheat and corn, but “real dietary exposure” is not limited to oat products. Children and adults are being exposed to glyphosate from a variety of sources, with potentially devastating effects.

In August 2018, jurors ruled Monsanto (which was taken over by Bayer in June 2018) must pay $289 million in damages to DeWayne “Lee” Johnson, a former school groundskeeper who claimed the company’s herbicide Roundup caused his terminal cancer.

The jury agreed, awarding Johnson not only in the form of monetary justice but also collaborating claims that Monsanto knew for decades that Roundup was dangerous — and acted with “malice or oppression” to cover up its risks.19 The EPA, likewise, has appeared to incorrectly dismiss concerns relating to glyphosate toxicity. In their petition, EWG noted:

“EWG contends that the EPA Office of Pesticide Programs incorrectly dismissed many study findings that showed statistically significant dose-response trends for glyphosate carcinogenicity. EPA’s dismissal of those studies has enabled the continued approval of increasingly high tolerance levels of glyphosate as a residue on common foods.”

Monsanto Hid Involvement in Ghostwriting Journal Studies

During the Johnson trial, court-ordered unsealed documents revealed that Monsanto scientists ghostwrote studies to clear glyphosate’s name and even hired a scientist to persuade the EPA to change its cancer classification decision on the chemical.20 Critical Reviews in Toxicology will also issue an “Expression of Concern” on a Roundup safety study because Monsanto didn’t disclose its involvement in the research.21

The study was a supplement to the journal, titled, “An Independent Review of the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate.” It claimed the articles had not been reviewed by Monsanto employees or attorneys, but internal emails revealed “Monsanto scientists were heavily involved in organizing, reviewing and editing article drafts,” Bloomberg reported.22

Unfortunately, the journal intends to leave the paper’s title alone, even though, as Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Bloomberg, “There is nothing independent about this review by any stretch of the imagination.”23

Dicamba Is Killing More Trees

Dicamba is another herbicide of concern, use of which has been increasing due to the release of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Xtend cotton and soybeans — GE plants designed to tolerate both glyphosate and dicamba. Dicamba is notorious for drifting, and even the newer formulation, which was supposed to have low volatility, is continuing to drift.

When it hits neighboring crops or trees that aren’t dicamba-resistant, the results are often devastating. Previously, at least four states — Iowa, Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee — have received complaints that dicamba may be damaging oak trees and other species, particularly sycamore, cypress and Bradford pear.24,25

In Tennessee, thousands of cypress trees near Reelfoot Lake, some more than 200 years old, have needles that are curling and turning brown as a result of dicamba drift. The EPA placed some restrictions on dicamba usage in 2017, but reports of damage have continued in 2018 — and state officials aren’t doing much to stop it. According to NPR:26

“There are billions of dollars at stake. Monsanto is arguing that the government can't take this tool away from farmers. If used properly, the company says, dicamba doesn't hurt anything but weeds …

Back at Reelfoot Lake, [Mike] Hayes [who owns a resort on the lake] says his prematurely brown cypress trees are evidence that this isn't true. He thinks state politicians are ignoring the problem — in part because they're scared of Monsanto.”

Monsanto, meanwhile, has continued to downplay the damage reports, sometimes blaming them on farmers’ use of the chemicals at wind speeds higher than outlined on the label, changes in wind speed or direction, or on other factors entirely.

They have no plans to scale back usage of the environmentally devastating chemical, instead boasting that they intend to sell even more GE Xtend crops (and the dicamba to go along with them) in 2019.”27

How Much Glyphosate Is in Your Body — and Your Drinking Water?

If you’d like to know your personal glyphosate levels, you can now find out, while also participating in a worldwide study on environmental glyphosate exposures. The Health Research Institute (HRI) in Iowa developed the glyphosate urine test kit, which will allow you to determine your own exposure to this toxic herbicide.

Ordering this kit automatically allows you to participate in the study and help HRI better understand the extent of glyphosate exposure and contamination. In a few weeks, you will receive your results, along with information on how your results compare with others and what to do to help reduce your exposure. We are providing these kits to you at no profit in order for you to participate in this environmental study.

In the meantime, eating organic as much as possible and investing in a good water filtration system for your home are among the best ways to lower your exposure to glyphosate and other pesticides.

In the case of glyphosate, it’s also wise to avoid desiccated crops like wheat and oats. If you want to know how much glyphosate may be in your drinking water, HRI has also developed a glyphosate water test kit that will allow you to determine glyphosate levels in your water source.

If you’re concerned about glyphosate residues in your food, you can help to prompt change by reaching out to the companies that make your food. Let them know that you prefer foods without glyphosate residues — and are prepared to switch brands if necessary to find them.

In addition to voicing your opinion to food companies, contact the EPA and encourage them to restrict preharvest applications of glyphosate in order to reduce the amount of this toxic chemical entering the food supply.

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/10/09/petition-to-ban-pre-harvest-glyphosate-spraying.aspx

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The report comes amid long-standing debate about the safety of the chemical glyphosate, which federal regulators maintain is not likely to cause cancer.

An environmental research and advocacy group has found traces of a controversial herbicide in Cheerios, Quaker Oats and other breakfast foods that it says could increase cancer risk for children.

The report comes amid long-standing debate about the safety of the chemical glyphosate, which federal regulators maintain is not likely to cause cancer.

In its report, released Wednesday, the Environmental Working Group said that it tested 45 samples of breakfast foods made from oats grown in fields sprayed with herbicides. Then, using a strict standard the group developed, it found elevated levels of glyphosate in 31 of them.

“There are levels above what we could consider safe in very popular breakfast foods,” said Alexis Temkin, the group’s toxicologist who helped with the analysis in the report.

The findings by the group, which has opposed the use of pesticides that may end up in food, were reported widely. But the question of whether glyphosate is safe is not so simple.

In fact, it is central to a raging international debate about the chemical that has spawned thousands of lawsuits, allegations of faulty research supporting and opposing the chemical and a vigorous defense of the herbicide from Monsanto, the company that helped develop it 40 years ago and helped turn it into the most popular weedkiller in the world.

Scott Partridge, a vice president at Monsanto, said in an interview Wednesday that hundreds of studies had validated the safety of glyphosate and that it doesn’t cause cancer. He called the Environmental Working Group an activist group.

“They have an agenda,” he said. “They are fear-mongering. They distort science.”

Central to critiques of the glyphosate, which prevents plants from photosynthesizing, is a 2015 decision by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer to declare glyphosate a probable carcinogen.

That spurred a federal case in the United States over such claims and prompted California to declare it a chemical that is known to cause cancer.

Last week, a California jury found that Monsanto had failed to warn a school groundskeeper of the cancer risks posed by its weedkiller, Roundup, of which glyphosate is an active ingredient. The man’s lawyers said he developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using the weedkiller as part of his job as a pest control manager for a California county school system.

Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million in damages. The company says it is facing more than 5,200 similar lawsuits.

Some research points to other potential health effects of glyphosate. In a study published last year in Scientific Reports, a journal from the publishers of Nature, rats that consumed very low doses of glyphosate each day showed early signs of fatty liver disease within three months, which worsened over time.

But many regulators and researchers say glyphosate is safe.

The classification by the International Agency for Research on Cancer has been disputed by U.S. and European regulators. And a recent major study, published by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, “observed no associations between glyphosate use and overall cancer risk.”

In December 2017, the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft human health risk assessment that said glyphosate was most likely not carcinogenic to humans.

The EPA is currently reviewing public comments on that assessment as part of a standard review, and will decide whether the agency needs any “mitigation measures” by 2019, a spokesman said Wednesday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates domestic and imported food to make sure it does not exceed levels set by the EPA, said that based on 2016 samples, it had not found any violations of EPA standards with glyphosate. More recent samples are still under review, an agency spokeswoman said.

The FDA said Wednesday that it would consider the Environmental Working Group’s findings.

Both Quaker Oats and General Mills, which makes Cheerios, said that their products were safe and met federal standards.

“While our products comply with all safety and regulatory requirements, we are happy to be part of the discussion and are interested in collaborating with industry peers, regulators and other interested parties on glyphosate,” a Quaker spokesman said Wednesday.

A General Mills spokeswoman said, “Our products are safe and without question they meet regulatory safety levels.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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