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One can’t visit a hardware store or a big box like Walmart, Lowes, or Home Depot without walking past a lawn and garden product called Roundup.
It’s everywhere – and used by tens of millions of U.S. homeowners and farmers who use it, believing it’s safe.
After all – the ads promoting the product claim it works like magic to control weeds – so why not use it – right?
But is it safe?
Not according to an increasing number of scientists – and courts.
In 2021, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco upheld an $87 million verdict against the makers of Roundup in a case brought by a California couple claiming the chemical caused their cancers.
And there are currently over 4,000 active lawsuits in the U.S. alone claiming physical harm from the product.
Is this news of harm a new development?
Nope.
Scientists from around the world have been accumulating evidence for years that Roundup and its key ingredient, glyphosate, cause or contribute to health problems that include:
- ADHD
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Autism
- Congenital disabilities
- Cancer (including cancer of the breast and the brain)
- Celiac disease and gluten intolerance
- Chronic kidney disease
- Colitis
- Depression
- Diabetes
- Heart disease
- Hypothyroidism
- Inflammatory Bowl Disease (“Leaky Gut Syndrome)
- Liver disease
- Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)
- Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
- Non-Hodgkin lymphoma
- Parkinson’s disease
- Pregnancy problems (infertility, miscarriages, stillbirths)
- Obesity
- Reproductive problems
- Respiratory illnesses
The World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer agency warned that Roundup is "probably carcinogenic."
And the European Union is banning its use effective in late 2023.
Scientists are also increasingly finding dangerous levels of Roundup and glyphosate in drinking water supplies and our food supply.
Why wouldn’t they? It’s widely used everywhere and is water soluble (rainwater now consistently contains glyphosate). It’s used to control weeds, and farmers use glyphosate in large quantities as a drying agent on wheat and oat crops.
As a drying agent…on crops used for food.
Does Monsanto - the manufacturer of Roundup, acknowledge the dangers? And are these issues problems that Monsanto has known about for years?
Attorneys for a man injured by Roundup in California have long claimed that Monsanto has “championed falsified data and attacked legitimate studies” that revealed the dangers of its herbicides and led a “prolonged campaign of misinformation” to convince government agencies, farmers, and consumers that Roundup was safe.
The Sierra Club reports that “internal communications made clear that Monsanto—the company that created saccharine and went on to develop DDT and Agent Orange—was not only aware that independent scientific studies had found that its blockbuster weed killer, Roundup, and the primary ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, were probably carcinogenic and harmful to human health, but the company had also tried to bury the findings. The documents also proved that Monsanto ghost-wrote scientific studies that suggested Roundup was safe (when the company knew it wasn’t), paid experts to support those claims, pressured scientists to reverse their previous conclusions that glyphosate could be linked to cancer, and successfully lobbied regulators at the EPA to keep the agency’s own findings—that glyphosate was probably harmful to humans—under wraps.”
Remember the claims that DDT was safe?
That example is a lesson we should never forget if we care about human life and the earth’s future.
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