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From Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard:
Last week, a California jury awarded former school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson $289 million in damages, linking his terminal cancer to the use of Roundup, the most popular weed killer in the world.The Environmental Working Group released a report that found unsafe levels of Roundup in many of our favorite oat cereals, oatmeal, granolas, and snack bars. This threat is hitting home here in Hawaii as well. A recent study found Roundup in about one-third of the honey sampled from stores in Kauai, and in 27% of the hives sampled island-wide.
This is unacceptable. The pervasive presence of harmful pesticides hurts our bees, our food, and our aina (land). In our islands and in the rest of the country, we must find alternative solutions for farming and landscape maintenance--so we can move towards banning these harmful chemicals at last. Protecting the planet is one of our sacred responsibilities, and one that I will always champion. Mahalo for raising your voice and chipping in on behalf of a clean, healthy future.
Aloha, Tulsi Gabbard
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From the New York Times article By Mihir Zaveri Aug. 15, 2018
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 longstanding debate about the safety of the chemical glyphosate, which federal regulators maintain is not likely to cause cancer.
"There are levels above what we could consider safe in very popular breakfast foods," said Alexis Temkin, Environmental Working Group's toxicologist.
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 weed killer in the world.
What follows, from Monsanto, is the usual mendacious corporate claptrap with all of its predictable feigned innocence, wallowing in ineffectuality (remember this: the company is facing more than 5,200 similar lawsuits!)
Scott Partridge, a vice president at Monsanto, said in an interview 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.
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.
The classification by the International Agency for Research on Cancer has been disputed by United States and European regulators. A recent major study, published by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, "observed no associations between glyphosate use and overall cancer risk."
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