Dear EPA...

After yesterday's Glyphosate Awareness chat, I commented on a page on the EPA web site to which someone linked:

"
Don't you think the glyphosate fact sheet should mention that glyphosate causes painful and life-threatening reactions in celiacs? NIH link:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

After 20 years as models of healthy living with the celiac gene, my mother and I are once again having symptoms out of control due to airborne vapors and contaminated foods. As I type this comment I'm having a reaction that would cause a non-celiac to take a sick day and probably rush to the hospital, but as a celiac I already know that it's just another contaminated food product I ate. I know people whose reactions were already disabling; I know someone who died during his (non-celiac) glyphosate reaction (narcolepsy) last summer.

Isn't it time to admit that this chemical is building up to levels that produce at least MODERATE toxicity? And even if it's making only a few people sick (which is not the case--it makes most test subjects sick, but only a few in each group *in the same way*)...how many people is it all right to harm?
"

In this morning's e-mail, I received an unsigned form letter full of links to a lot of other sites. This is the problem with a big, clunky federal government, and the reason why we need to downsize that government. I've believed for a long time that a really effective way to address government waste would be to hold each government employee personally accountable to each taxpayer who brings a problem to the attention of a government agency. If the employee scans for keywords and starts spewing random "referrals," which as U.S. taxpayers know often include referrals to offices that closed three years ago, that is an unnecessary employee who needs to get out of Washington permanently. If the employee honestly thinks someone else needs to be consulted, the employee should be required to find that person, make a proper introduction, and repeat what the taxpayer told the employee before being allowed to get back to the computer game the employee had been playing.

My reply:

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Taxpayers are not tennis balls. You must get a grip on that tendency to respond to every comment/question by "referring" people to someone, anyone else, just so you can get back to whatever you were doing before. Individual government employees need to take responsibility for things like updating the glyphosate information page to reflect the fact that NIH has published, long ago, the proof that glyphosate causes nasty reactions in all people who do have the celiac gene. (It also causes bizarrely celiac-like reactions in many people who do not have the gene.)

For what it's worth, I downloaded the documents from the EPA site in March. I read them before posting a comment on them then. On the same day I also blogged about them ( https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html ), and have been publicizing them ever since. I'm just not sure why the NIH page was omitted since it confirms that not only does glyphosate cause some unpleasant reaction or other, with lots of individual variation, across all species studied, but it specifically targets Irish-Americans (since the strong form of the celiac gene is pretty much limited to people of Irish descent).

I'm also not sure how it was possible, even for that guy who resigned from the job, to let corporate interests focus on the relatively low incidence of each individual, genetically determined reaction, from the 8 classes of glyphosate reactions identified in humans by hospital emergency care staff--rather than the main fact these documents prove, which is that glyphosate is harmful to almost everybody, but in different ways and degrees.

You, individually, whoever you are, need to protect yourself against long-term guilt reactions by taking action on this issue and others like it.

Toward that end, I urge you to answer this question individually: How many of your neighbors or customers is it acceptable to harm?

You don't need to e-mail the answer to me; I'm not your spiritual counsellor. You need to reconsider the level of warning about glyphosate safety to ensure that no glyphosate reaches food or drinking water supplies, since continuing to allow glyphosate to be used in the current reckless manner amounts to "Irish Genocide."
"

Why am I posting this, Gentle Readers? To encourage youall to bombard the EPA with your own comments and questions. If you get form letters full of links, go ahead and use those links, if usable, to bombard other government offices. And, meanwhile, publicize the inefficiency of the federal government and the need to manage things like glyphosate on the local level. City government, along with business owners, home owners, schools, and offices, need to be the ones making the decision within hours, not years: "There are people of Irish descent in this town/city/county, therefore nobody has a right even to paint liquid glyphosate on individual plants, which is a compromise that might reasonably be allowed with some 'pesticides' in some situations."

Whatever individuals' reactions to glyphosate may be, nobody should be allowed to inflict those reactions on the same person twice.