Monsanto, Scientific Deception and Cancer
by Binoy Kampmark / May 25th, 2019
Money may not be able to buy the purest love, but it can buy the best, life-ending cancer. For Monsanto, giant of rule and misrule in matters of genetically modified crops, known for bullying practices towards farmers, things have not been so rosy of late. Ever the self-promoter of saving the world an agricultural headache (biotech crops being the earths touted nutritional salvation), the company has run into a set of legal snags that have raided its funds and risk sinking it, along with Bayer AG, the company that bought it last year for $63 billion.
A spate of legal cases have begun entering the folklore of resistance to the company. Central to it is the use of glyphosate, the worlds most widely used weedkiller marketed since 1974 as Roundup, and a core chemical in the agrochemical industry. In 2015, it was deemed by the World Health Organizations International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) probably carcinogenic to humans in addition to being genotoxic and clearly carcinogenic to animals.
The legal train commenced last August, when a state court in San Francisco found for Dewayne Lee Johnson, a 46-year-old former school groundskeeper, ordering $289 million in damages. (The amount was subsequently reduced to $78 million.) The jury had been satisfied that the use of the Roundup weedkiller, with its glyphosate constitution, had, in fact, been the cause of Johnsons cancer. They also found that the company had paid insufficient heed to warning the plaintiff of the impending dangers, also acting, in the process, with malice or oppression.
The picture that emerged in trial was of a beast keen to keep critics at bay and intimidate opponents. Attorney Brent Wisner was keen to press the issue. Monsanto has specifically gone out of its way to bully and to fight independent researchers. Wisners evidence a selection of internal Monsanto emails showed the steadfast rejection on its part of warnings critical and researched. They fought science.
More:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/05/monsanto-scientific-deception-and-cancer/
watoos
(7,142 posts)usually followed by lawyer commercials.
Any truth to the rumor, people are saying, I don't know, that Trump is bringing back DDT?
Nitram
(22,663 posts)A meta-study of every stringent study the National Institutes of Health could locate in the literature, titled The evidence of human exposure to glyphosate: a review concluded that:
"...additional studies are urgently needed to evaluate levels of glyphosate and related metabolites in the general population and in workers, including across different geographic areas, apportioning the exposure sources and considering changes in these measures over time. Improved exposure assessment is necessary for conducting accurate risk assessments and high quality epidemiological studies. This work is crucial given the substantial increase in glyphosate use in recent years [1] and the current questions of carcinogenicity under debate by health and environmental agencies around the world [5]"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6322310/
Archae
(46,260 posts)In an article decrying the "persecution" of Julian Assange, they use RT propaganda.
I've called this the "breast implant trial 2.0" and it still looks like it.
And "beast keen to keep critics at bay" is inflammatory, and a smear.