Why spinach in the title for this post? Because in the U.S. when I was growing up "spinach" was used to mean "any and all foods that kids hate, but are told they need to eat for health reasons." I personally like spinach, especially raw "baby" spinach, which I eat the way some people eat chips--but then I'm not exactly a kid any more.
Anyway, status update: On Friday I received payment for a new non-book blog post. On my home computer I had one ready to transfer about the trending topic of gun control, as freshly marketed to kids too young to remember what horrible effects a gun ban had on (mostly males between ages 13-30) in Washington when I lived there. I also thought about a cute animal post and a pretty spring flower poem. But when I came online and finished my hack writing yesterday, reality said no. Reality said I have to write more about glyphosate and my icky-once-more celiac life. Did the nice lady ever get her money's worth of research in this one, and it's not fun reading, either, I might add. I have read a lot of squick today in order to help you navigate directly to the documents you most need to read, for health reasons.
Our government is officially reconsidering the self-evident truth that glyphosate and various other "pesticides" need to be banned.
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| One of the books my Drill Sergeant Dad read aloud to the children later to be known as Priscilla King and her late lamented brother, while our own choices still included Little Golden Books or at least Golden Nature Guides...When did "explosive new books" cost 95 cents? Copyright 1970. The information discussed below was in print before my sisters were alive! |
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Long story as short as possible, for first-time readers: All non-emergency use or production of "pesticides" needs to be forever banned by common sense, because we've all lived long enough to knows that they all start a Vicious Spray Cycle. You spray poison to kill a nuisance species. You see a gratifying number of nuisance plants or animals die, right away. You also see many of that species' natural predators die. So then, at the end of whatever amount of time it takes the surviving specimens of the nuisance species to reproduce...all prey species reproduce faster than their natural predators, so the next generation of the nuisance species is more numerous than the generation you tried to poison. And hardier; more of them have inherited resistance to the poison. And although some "pesticides" are more immediately toxic to humans than others, nobody has yet identified a "pesticide" that actually does humans any good. Repeated use of "pesticides" is what made corn earworms and codling moths (apple worms) major pests, rather than rare nuisances, in the United States. We need to be moving beyond this whole stupid, self-destructive idea of trying to control any plant or animal population by poison. We need to be thinking, "Just don't go there. If we want to see fewer of this species, there must be a better way than poisoning anything."
By limiting our use of poisons to real emergencies, we can limit the use of things like DDT to levels that don't make humans sick and that actually stop the mosquito-borne plagues...but we need policies like "Once, not twice, in fifty years."
That's axiomatic. That's what my parents pounded into me, early in the Nixon administration, before we even had a federal Environmental Protection Agency. Most of the old fogies who failed to absorb this information, in my part of the world, have been dead for a long time. It always surprises and disturbs me that anyone my age or younger still thinks any "pesticide" can be used over and over.
Yes, reasonable people might want to spray wasps and hornets to knock'em down before they sting anyone...but there's no need to spray poison. Anything that sticks to their skins will stop wasps and hornets attacking humans. Those vegetable oil emulsion sprays you might use to lubricate baking pans can kill insects. (Insects breathe through their skins, so they'll drown in any liquid that adheres to their skin surface for very long.) Just about any household cleaning product you have in a spray bottle will at least take their minds off attacking anybody. Insect repellent sprayed right on them will. Alcohol, wintergreen, witch hazel, Listerine, or any alcohol-based herbal tincture you might use will kill some insects and adjust the mental attitudes of the ones that survive. I don't buy vodka, but people who do say it's also effective.
You do not, ever, need to spray plants with anything stronger than salad dressing. Just the salt and vinegar will kill most plants, without even adding the oil. So will very hot water. The only plants that really need to have anything poured on them to kill them, in any case, are the Rhus genus (poison ivy)--and goats will happily clear them out of a field. The way to control unwanted plants is to chop and dig and, if it's really necessary, burn. There is no need for any kind of poison to control nuisance plants.
There is a wide-open market for more sophisticated, more efficient gadgets to control nuisance plants. The technology already exists, at least theoretically, to build robots that could selectively weed grass out of a field of green wheat plants. "Pesticides" are clogging the wheels of Progress, here, and it's hard to believe that the nastiest of the "herbicides" is being manufactured by the same company that financially nurtured the growth of the smartest of the tech companies.
There is a lot of controversy about exactly how much harm any of the "pesticides" do to humans. We've all heard that DDT was banned because it caused cancer, and some of us have also heard that DDT was not conclusively shown to cause cancer more directly than other things that are still in the U.S. food supply, that DDT was really banned because it had been overused to the point of uselessness. Chlordane and lindane were also suspected of causing cancer, known to be easy to use to kill humans and animals; chlordane vapors give me asthma so I'm glad those two were banned. Dioxin...the controversy still rages about how bad it is, but there is general agreement that dioxin was very bad.
Glyphosate became popular because, although close observation shows that it does have harmful effects on humans, its effects on humans vary widely, often don't occur immediately, and aren't readily suspected. People will say "I work with glyphosate all the time; all it does is taste nasty." Er, um...not hardly. Observers may notice effects, especially on these people's mental functions, that the person does not notice or admit in perself. One effect I notice some people showing after exposure to glyphosate is impaired cognitive function: the poison makes them less alert, less efficient, and less intelligent than they were the day before exposure.
In the spring of 1995 several people in my part of the world began losing significant quantities of blood every time we sat on the toilet, and local bee colonies collapsed; the local honey industry died. I wondered whether it had really been something in the water as four people in my neighborhood consulted different doctors and got different diagnoses in one week. One was told it was a reaction to medication, which was true. One was told it was chronic Crohn's Disease, which seems to have been true. One was told it was cancer and he had six months to live--and he's still working. I was told it might be celiac sprue, though then again, even people who have the rare "strong" form of that gene don't normally develop sprue before age fifty; I was only about thirty so I ought to be tested for cancer. I was lucky. I tested for gluten intolerance at home, found that that was what I had, didn't need the test for cancer. I don't expect I'll ever be able to sit around a table with non-celiac people and eat a polite little portion of everything they eat, without being sick, for the rest of my life, but since I have felt so much better after age 30 than I did in my teens and twenties, I don't mind.
In the spring of 1995 my neighborhood was also saturated with the increasingly popular glyphosate formula marketed as "Roundup" lawn weedkiller. So there really was something in the water.
Every year since 1995, more people who don't even have the celiac gene have been breaking out with "gluten sensitivity." How is it possible that the food that's been "the staff of life" for most of humankind, worldwide, for thousands of years, is now being blamed for everything that goes wrong with otherwise healthy North Americans? These people are not genuinely gluten-intolerant, yet they have reactions to wheat gluten that mimic celiac reactions up to and including celiac sprue. The answer is that glyphosate residues, which are now present in most foods because some farmers are spraying this poison right on food crops to speed up the ripening process and preserve food from insects, affect many people the same way wheat gluten affects celiacs--only moreso. Glyphosate exposure affects us celiacs, of course, the same way wheat gluten does--only much moreso. I don't have a reaction to skin contact with wheat.
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| Copyright 2016. |
[Regular readers may resume reading. New content begins here.]
Now the E.P.A. has set up a web site for the public to read about and discuss these pesticides. They've not made it easy for anybody, and left-wing correspondents are screeching in my e-mail headlines, "Blame that horrible Republican head of the E.P.A. for making it difficult," blah blah. One should never assume malice behind what is adequately explained by incompetence; nevertheless, that E.P.A. web site is a bore. So this web site will now undertake to simplify the reading list for you. "You," in this case, meaning The Nephews, the youngest of whom may be reading beyond a sixth grade level but are still in grade six anyway.
If you have time, of course, reading the whole dang mess should be interesting and useful. Several other chemicals, the names of which I don't even recognize, are also being reconsidered. Students can find material for years of term papers.
This is a nasty PDF document; this computer usually handles PDFs well, too.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0083
What you'll learn here is whether, and why, you've been having celiac-like reactions to foods that do not naturally contain any trace of wheat gluten. Food products that are very likely to contain glyphosate residues include apricots, apples, asparagus, avocados, cherries, corn, grapes, all nuts, nectarines, kiwifruit, olives, peaches, pears, prunes, pluots, pomegranates, soybeans. Between 2004 and 2013 all of the fig, sugar beet, and soybean growers reporting to this U.S.D.A. study admitted having sprayed glyphosate on these food crops. Glyphosate was also sprayed on nearly all the citrus fruit in the U.S., although most of it was trapped on those thick, leathery peels. Presumably most glyphosate sprayed on nuts was sprayed on the shells--but that assumption becomes less safe for each year of the present century, as Monsanto has positively encouraged farmers to use up supplies of this poison by spraying it right onto shelled nuts as a preservative.
This one at least opens as a Word document--867 pages. No points for guessing that none of the short documents listed in this bibliography is going to be available from Amazon, your public library, or your neighborhood bookstore...but it's worth skimming through the document just to see how many of the masses of paper presented to the E.P.A. came from chemical companies, not from independent researchers. Like just about all of them. It's not "Published by U. Mass., U. Conn., U. Ky., Harvard, Berkeley..."; it's "Published by Monsanto, Dow, Monsanto, Johnson, Monsanto..."
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0086
This 33-page PDF basically confirms that glyphosate residues linger in milk, meat, and eggs.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0087
This user-friendly, feel-good document airbrushes the facts almost beyond recognition. You can't say it contains lies, but..."Animals exposed to products with glyphosate may drool, vomit, have diarrhea, seem sleepy"...or die in screaming agony like poor, cute, cuddly Boots-kitten, last summer? Or die slowly, having time to cuddle kittens who insisted on nursing, so then one kitten died right away, one after acting droopy for a day or so, one after three days in a coma, like poor, lovable Bisquit-cat? Lord. "No information was found linking exposure to glyphosate with asthma"...because effects on individual humans vary, like effects on individual animals; I know for sure that when I inhaled glyphosate vapors I had asthma, followed by celiac sprue. But some people I know might get a skin rash, or feel weak all over, or show more severe memory loss, or more of a learning disorder, or more arthritis...
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/glyphogen.html
This page claims that the E.P.A. found ecological risks, but not risks directly to human health, associated with glyphosate. How is that possible? Because the effects on individuals vary enough that traditional statistical analyses don't show what's considered conclusive evidence that glyphosate harms humans. We all learned in college that if something consistently causes asthma in one person and mood swings in another person and fainting in another person, even if you could get those people to demonstrate conclusively that that thing had that effect on them, you would not have conclusive evidence that it has an effect on humans, generally. Lord have mercy.
https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/epa-releases-draft-risk-assessments-glyphosate
This page opens a 318-page PDF that summarizes the results of extensive studies as showing that glyphosate presents some risk to birds, insects, plants, and animals, although for several specific species that were studied the results were inconclusive...like the results of studies involving humans and domestic animals, I'd guess. Statistics buffs will want to read the whole thing; I'm not a true statistics buff, due to my dyscalculia, or math-dyslexia, but what I did read was pret-ty in-ter-est-ing.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0077
This one discusses exactly how much glyphosate and its various residues and by-products of decomposition are likely to seep into water. Frankly, it's over my head, possibly because it contains the bizarre concept of an allowable level of glyphosate in drinking water. Any poison is more than we want in drinking water!
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0076
This one opens lots of statistical tables summarizing which kinds of cancer occurred more frequently, and less frequently, in rats and mice exposed to various doses of glyphosate. For a start: Rodents exposed to glyphosate are more likely to develop cancer in parts of the body analogous to the very most sensitive and vulnerable parts of a human body. They may be actually less likely to develop cancer of the lungs or thyroid gland, but that may be because the more sensitive parts go first.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0075
This one opens a 204-page PDF discussing the literature the E.P.A. have read from sources other than chemical companies about the effects of glyphosate...
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0067
Note this howler on page 17:
"
Impact on Glyphosate Human Health Risk Assessment
Over 450 open literature journal articles were considered as part of this review. Only a limited number of these studies were deemed acceptable and appropriate for consideration in risk assessment.
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What that means in plain English is that documentation of the widely differing effects glyphosate is having on different people--effects that are probably determined by genes, like the celiac genes, such that glyphosate damage may actually turn out to be dependent on ethnicity--has been discarded as "anecdotal rather than scientific." That's why glyphosate wasn't banned in 1995. Rigorous scientific studies would have to be conducted on a truly monstrous scale to identify all the different ways glyphosate is harming people, in more than an "anecdotal" way. An analysis of the "anecdotal" literature might be simpler--and well worth doing!
Not that all of these studies that were discarded as being unscientific have been the firsthand, bloggy, "I walked past a field sprayed with glyphosate and this is how I've felt during the week since then" kind of stories that the word "anecdotal" calls to mind. One study, for instance, attempted to identify glyphosate effects on uterine and embryonic cells that were being cultivated in a laboratory, rather than actually taking the risk of feeding glyphosate to pregnant women to find out whether it caused birth defects and/or spontaneous abortions. Four quibbles caused this humanely planned, and probably accurate, study to be discarded.
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- Exposure was directly to human embryonic and placental cells as well as other tissues.
- The active ingredient was not measured.
- It is difficult to extrapolate in vitro effects with in vivo toxicity.
- The percent purity of the reagent grade glyphosate was not stated.
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And this web site is sure that the company-funded studies that purported to show that glyphosate was safe were held to similar standards of rigor...Not!
This document confirms, among other things, that the basis for the claim that glyphosate probably won't cause cancer in humans is that some studies found that it caused relatively little increase in cancer in rats. (Yes, the other study linked above found that it did raise the incidence of some kinds of cancer in rats. Cancer seems to be promoted and prevented by a complex interaction of several different factors, so identifying a true cause for any kind of cancer is always going to be fiendishly difficult--although we do know that glyphosate is unlikely to prevent cancer. Anyway: different studies, different rats.) Note that the document also admits that glyphosate exposure seemed to be correlated with non-cancerous liver damage, brain damage, cataracts, and other eye damage in rats. When big corporations invest heavily in lobbying, this is the kind of evidence it takes to get permission to apply a known poison directly to foods like figs and apples that are normally eaten without even being peeled...
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0070
Here's a more recent study, analyzing reports of what happened after humans ingested glyphosate either by breathing, by getting it into their eyes, or by swallowing it. Yes, it does more than taste nasty. "8 major types of adverse health effects were identified: gastro-intestinal (4.8%), dermal (30.1%), upper-respiratory (10.3%), neurological (34.3%), cardiovascular (0.3%), ocular (13.8%), muscular (0.3%), and combination (5.5%) effects (Updated Review of Glyphosate Incident Reports, M. Hawkins and J. Cordova, 03/12/2009)." If you keep scrolling, you'll see some extremely disgusting pictures of skin rashes and other damage done by handling large amounts of glyphosate. "Neurological effects" can include twitching or paralysis (no human patient had yet died in howling convulsions like poor little Boots-kitten--as of 2009). One patient was paralyzed for 39 days in a hospital intensive care ward. Some people died. This study didn't even consider mental health effects--when I observe retirees who spray "Roundup" on their gardens, vertigo, memory loss, weakness, decreased or reversed progress toward recovery from strokes, confusion, and mood swings are some of the most obvious things I notice, but of course that's still "anecdotal," as hospital emergency room staff seldom remember what the patients were like the day before.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0069
This PDF evaluates the claim that glyphosate increases the risk of an otherwise rare type of cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and notes that this increase is mostly found among farm workers who work with other things that also seem to increase the risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma ("confounders"). Why do E.P.A. employees hesitate to observe, "Every little bit hurts," when it comes to cancer-promoting agents?
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0072
This PDF, in direct conflict with the one following it in numerical order, finds "no evidence that glyphosate is neurotoxic." (There may be more than one way of being paralyzed for 39 days?) The studies cited here did find that exposure to glyphosate caused "decreased body weights," as it might be because the internal surface of the colon is sloughing off in bleeding ulcers and therefore failing to digest food, and "toxicity to the liver, and/or kidney"--but not that "glyphosate is...immunotoxic." Say whaaat? If something is toxic to the liver and/or the kidneys, vital parts of the immune system, how can it not be immunotoxic? I'm keeping this one on my computer, and you might want to download and save it on yours if you want to do a presentation on the subject...as an example of a badly done study that needs to be done over. Wouldn't any self-respecting teacher, finding a whopper like "This is toxic to the liver and/or kidneys but it's not immunotoxic" in a freshman term paper, order the freshman to start all over with a different paper?
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0068
This one quantifies the amount of glyphosate exposure it took to cause "diarrhea, nasal discharge, and death in maternal animals" when glyphosate was fed to rabbits (specifically to nursing mothers, to pinpoint the levels in milk that become toxic to the baby bunnies as well). For rabbits, whose diet and metabolism aren't particularly similar to humans', that amount was "350 mg/kg/day." By scrolling through the rest of the 20 pages you might want to work out how much glyphosate you're likely to be consuming along with your daily fruits and veg, and--assuming that your reactions are more like a rabbit's than like an Irish-American celiac human's--how much more you can take before you too develop diarrhea, nasal discharge, and death. (Scientific studies are supposed to be cold-blooded, but that phrasing...! How many of those rabbits sank into comas before they died, and how many screamed?)
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0071
This PDF spends a lot of its 216 pages blathering about the generally observed fact that it's almost impossible to pinpoint a single cause of any kind of cancer. I don't know about you, but I say this one's a waste of disk space (and federal agents' time). Anyone who's read anything about cancer studies already knows that cancer is fiendishly hard to study. Anyone who's read the other PDFs (or had a nasty glyphosate reaction) already knows, also, that glyphosate harms (and may in some cases kill) people in more immediate ways before they'd have time to develop cancer.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0073
This three-page PDF admits that a correlation between glyphosate exposure and three types of cancer was found, but only after prolonged exposure. Well, duh...cancer does not normally develop overnight.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0074
What can we do with this information, Gentle Readers? First of all, each of those links opens a page you can use, after downloading and reading the document, to comment on the document--at the EPA site, or on social media, or both. You can e-mail the documents to friends. You can e-mail them (or, if you like, e-mail this summary of them) to your U.S. Senators and Representative.
Additionally, depending on the resources your computer has, you might want to paste key pages of those documents into a slideshow. They're all public documents; you're free and encouraged to use them during the official public discussion of why we need to ban glyphosate, during the rest of March and April.
What the documents as a group show is that, no matter how hard we-the-people have tried to ignore the cumulative effects of glyphosate exposure on our health, those effects are bad and getting worse. Glyphosate exposure is associated with cancer at high levels of exposure. That means, ban it now, and the harm it's already done may be reversible; put off banning it for another fifteen years, and we'll start to see it causing cancer. It also means, ban it now, and you may be absolutely astounded by how much better you may feel.
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