Take away : Fact checking is fast becoming one of the most important skills in our arsenal. 2:40 min "take my word for it" read 36:00 min fact check read
I admit that this article has kind of a click-bait title, but i promise a short and well documented read.
We all know about pesticides and biotech in general and how they’re responsible for so many of our health problems. It’s like knowing that your spouse is poisoning you but not confronting him/her because you don’t want to ruin the relationship.
Apparently, MIT decided to confront through a “lawyer” by presenting the US Congress with a series of studies on the devastating health effects of using glyphosate in agriculture.
The effect of this confrontation was an investigation held by the EPA which produced this report. It basically says that glyphosate cannot be characterized as a human carcinogenic because there is near to no evidence of it directly causing cancer in mice -the nearest thing to humans we can test on.
The truth of the matter is that although the results of tests for interstitial cell tumors (cancer) in male Sprague-Dawley rats are debatable, almost all primary DNA damage tests (results starting on pg 122) are positive. This means that we might not be directly affected by glyphosate, but our children will be.
Glyphosate was introduced in ’74 by Monsanto under the Roundup brand, sales have multiplied more than 100 fold in the US between the late ’70’s and the time the patent expired (2015-about the same time as the MIT research was being conducted) . Along with the Roundup product sales, proportional amounts of Roundup Ready crops (that would not be affected by it) where being sold in this period.
Here an idea about the glyphosate phenomenon between 1974 and 2014 in the US:
In 2011 the US looked like this from a glyphosate usage point of view:
Comming back to Europe, here is a call for support from the British National Farmers Union. see the infographic bellow:
YES, after all that i have just presented, they are trying to convince people to support glyphosate use in agriculture… ” propagandistically”, if i might add
And they’re not the only ones. #fakenews like this one were using the subject to trash the EU 2 months before Brexit.
So as you would imagine, the Parliament of the EU decided to “only” approve glyphosate for 7 more years of use as opposed to the initial proposal of 15 years.
And if i have failed to convince you, search Probable Carcinogenic List for glyphosate. That will do the trick.
As a conclusion, it’s safe to say that we need to learn to fact check and we need to learn fast. I encourage you to start on this article.
I’ll link an article detailing this as soon as it’s done, but the combination between the failing standardized educational system, fake news, and a profit driven global democratic system isn’t good. At least we’re not challenged with something new. It’s been like this since ancient times. If you don’t believe me, ask Socrates and Plato.
Farewell.