Glyphosate Awareness: Flaws in the Ramazzini Study

Yes, somebody found them. For new readers, the Ramazzini Institute studied the incidence of birth defects in rats whose mothers had been exposed to glyphosate, and found that, yes, a lot of those little rats came into this world looking a lot uglier than normal baby rats. Like, some were born without heads. So A Chemist In Langley is quibbling because people like me reported this as evidence supporting a claim of which I'd been skeptical at first--that glyphosate causes major birth defects. Ohhh, ooohhh, don't take it seriously yet, it's only a pilot study, we need to kill a lot more rats, and meanwhile celiac humans need to lose more blood, and stroke survivors need to lose more ground, and "chronic" Lyme Disease patients need to be disabled longer, and thyroid patients need to gain more weight and lose more competence, and migraine patients need to have more headaches, and...The Chemist's quibbles are valid but I think everyone can understand why we don't need to take time to bother about them. When a house is on fire, you don't stand around trying to measure the precise temperature of the flames.

https://achemistinlangley.net/2019/03/24/how-understanding-type-i-and-type-ii-errors-and-p-values-helps-in-assessing-the-conclusions-of-the-ramazzini-institute-13-week-pilot-study-on-glyphosate/

I posted this comment to the Chemist's blog, where it's "awaiting moderation." Since I don't trust people who are still defending glyphosate, however objectively and scientifically, I think I'll re-post it here, free of charge, in the public interest...

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Nice clarification. Of course, we have to read these things in context. The Ramazzini study simply destroyed a lot of rats whose immediate reactions left them unfit for the study of effects on the offspring of rats who showed no immediate reactions. Across species, glyphosate consistently produces a wide range of immediate reactions that include almost everything from itching to sudden death. Each individual reaction is statistically rare, but the majority of all lifeforms have undesirable reactions.

I am The Celiactivist because, unlike the majority of suddenly "gluten-sensitive" (or glyphosate-sensitive) people these days, I really do have a very rare gene that's harmless when I'm able to avoid symptom triggers. In the natural world, that's easy: I just don't eat wheat. Mind you, that has ruled out most social eating, but being healthy is worth that. But suddenly, since about 2011 when glyphosate spraying got out of hand in the U.S.,  I started having celiac reactions to lots of things that contained no wheat--even to air and water, after glyphosate pollution. Why was I having those reactions? I wrote to food manufacturers about cross-contamination, talked to neighbors about sprays, most recently stood in an open-air market and watched about half the crowd show sudden visible reactions after "Roundup" vapors blew through the place. Long story short: Glyphosate is the only common factor in my now out-of-control celiac disease, which I've worked hard to keep from *being* a disease. It's also the only common factor in a lot of acquaintances' chronic problems, like chronic Lyme Disease, or the new form of chronic mononucleosis. It's *not* the sole and whole cause of many chronic health problems--yet it noticeably makes them worse, in a different individual way, every time. Every. Blinkin'. Time! So yes, I *am* dam' mad about efforts to defend glyphosate by clutching to statistical straws. We need to step back, look at the big picture, see that glyphosate is making everyone sick, and stop torturing animals to find out exactly how one chemical can have so many different effects.

Perhaps it's time to bust a few more myths. I'm not an anti-capitalist organization. I'm an individual who actually believes capitalism is best checked by moral enlightenment. And I'm willing to admit it if my hypothesis *were* to be disproved, as it might be by repeated independent lab tests showing that my celiac blood did not react to glyphosate the same way it does to wheat gluten, only moreso. I think that's about as likely to happen as snow on the fourth of July, but if it did happen, I'd be willing to report it...

So why are these corporations not willing to fund the test? Hah. I think we all know *that*.
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Feh. Today's glyphosate news was actually encouraging on the whole, but toward the end of the live chat I met a troll who, however clueless and however well paid, made me feel really, seriously angry--not just a passing celiac rage, which last seconds, rarely minutes, and deserve mention only as a symptom, but a genuine permanent belief that the troll ought to be forcibly fed a vat of glyphosate, on live television. How can God allow these creatures to go on forcing other people to be sick? Why doesn't God just redirect all the nasty glyphosate reactions into the glyphosate shills? I want to go online and read that Werner Bauman has developed pseudo-celiac sprue, Kevin Folta has lost his job and driver's license due to out-of-control narcolepsy, and the scum who called for censorship of the glyphosate discussion on Twitter is reporting, after three months of total paralysis, that it spent the whole time in pain and trying to scream. I don't want anybody to rush out and murder these people; I want them to suffer, and I want them to know with every writhe and every groan that they did it to themselves and they deserve it. I feel like signing off with the classic

"Yours faithfully,

DISGUSTED."