Secret Ingredients – A Special Preview
Kathleen, a triathlete who mysteriously became paralyzed with debilitating pain, began looking for answers to her health conditions, and those of her children who were also suffering from a list of chronic diseases and disorders – including bronchitis, eczema, digestive issues, and food intolerances.
Initially, she began eliminating certain foods, like gluten, dairy, and soy, but they only saw limited results.
It wasn’t until she tried removing GMOs and chemical pesticides, like glyphosate, that they suddenly saw dramatic results: the inflammation and pain disappeared; skin rashes faded away; asthma and bronchitis were suddenly gone; indigestion and bloating gone.
Most surprising were the changes in her oldest son who had been diagnosed on the autism spectrum disorder at the age of two and a half. Most notably, his speech, cognition, and digestive function improved.
Kathleen’s experience is not isolated. This film shares stories of other families who watched their children’s health improve after removing GMOs and pesticides. Also included in the film are other individuals’ personal stories of cancer and infertility.
Interwoven with these personal stories are scientific explanations of how GMOs and pesticides can actually compromise human health – as well as testimonials from physicians who confirm that they see similar results in their patients who switch to non-GMO, organic diets.
For example, at a chiropractic clinic in Wisconsin, 77 couples that had been struggling with infertility and miscarriages all had healthy babies after eliminating GMOs and going organic.
And NY Times best-selling author Dr. David Perlmutter explains how glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp – which is sprayed on most GMOs and many other crops – can compromise our microbiome, promote inflammation, and exacerbate numerous health conditions.
Like PCBs, DDT, lead, and other toxic chemicals, it is reasonable to suspect that as long as industries are making billions, they are unlikely to reveal the truth about the health risks of their products.
While Monsanto and the rest of the industry have worked mightily to protect their profits and suppress scientific evidence that clearly demonstrates any health risks – including cancer – this film includes an exclusive interview with an independent scientist who has gained access to the original test results submitted to the EPA for the approval of glyphosate.
To obtain these sealed documents, he was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement. If glyphosate is so safe, why are these and other documents not made public?
While cynics may disregard these miraculous stories of healing as purely anecdotal, others may see them as a clue to a much larger trend in the deteriorating health of our society – and could very well leave them asking, What might happen if I remove the ‘secret ingredients’ from my own diet?
WATCH 30-min. preview:
Watch the full documentary here.
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aaron
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They are poisoning us with the ‘food’
eat up!
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Saighdear
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tried removing GMOs and chemical pesticides, like glyphosate ….. Erm, how does one do that? I can generally hope to NOT eat GMO Meat, but veggie prods ? and as for the GLyphosate ? … No, I prefer to have been still able to use the old Hormonal Herbicides ( I believe) but it’s all this “modern” stuff Pre- & post- Harvest and in storage that I’m against.
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George Tomaich
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Special Report
DDT, Fraud, and Tragedy
Why are millions dying of malaria, a disease all but extinct forty years ago?
By Gerald Sirkin and Natalie Sirkin – 2.24.05
“Fraud in science is a major problem.” So begins “DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud” by the late J. Gordon Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Entomology at San Jose State University in San Jose, California.
The article was published shortly after his death last July in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Fall, 2004. It is based in part on his 34-page manuscript discussing fraud in acid rain, ozone holes, ultraviolet radiation, carbon dioxide, global warming, and pesticides, particularly DDT.
His publications distinguish Edwards as the leading authority on the environmental science and politics of DDT.
In World War I, prior to the discovery of the insecticidal potential of DDT, typhus killed more servicemen than bullets. In World War II, typhus was no problem. The world has marveled at the effectiveness of DDT in fighting malaria, yellow fever, dengue, sleeping sickness, plague, encephalitis, West Nile Virus, and other diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, fleas, and lice.
Today, the greatest killer and disabler is malaria, which kills a person every 30 seconds. By the 1960s, DDT had brought malaria near to extinction. “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable,” said the National Academy of Sciences.
But the handwriting was on the wall when William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in an address to the Audubon Society in Milwaukee in 1971, clearly stated his position:
As a member of the Audubon Society myself, and knowing the impact of this chlorinated hydrocarbon in certain species of raptorial birds, I was highly suspicious of this compound [DDT], to put it mildly. But I was compelled by the facts to temper my emotions.
“As you know, many mass uses of DDT have already been prohibited, including all uses around the home. Certainly we’ll all feel better when the persistent compounds can be phased out in favor of biological controls. But awaiting this millennium does not permit the luxury of dodging the harsh decisions of today.
Rachel Carson began the countrywide assault on DDT with her 1962 book, Silent Spring. Carson made errors, some designed to scare, about DDT and synthetic pesticides. “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception to death,” she intoned.
“This is nonsense,” commented pesticide specialists Bruce N. Ames and Thomas H. Jukes of the University of California at Berkeley. (Ames is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, world renowned. Jukes, who died a few years ago, was a professor of biophysics and a leader in the defense of DDT.) “Every chemical is dangerous if the concentration is too high. Moreover, 99.9 percent of the chemicals humans ingest are natural… produced by plants to kill off predators,” Ames and Jukes wrote in Reason in 1993.
Carson, not very scrupulous, implied that the renowned Albert Schweitzer agreed with her on DDT by dedicating Silent Spring “to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.'” Professor Edwards doubted the implication. He got a copy of Schweitzer’s autobiography. Dr. Schweitzer was referring to atomic warfare. Professor Edwards found on page 262, “How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause, but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.”
But Miss Carson’s skillful writing was enough to direct a new-born environmental industry looking for a hot issue into a feverish campaign against DDT. “Rachel Carson set the style for environmentalism. Exaggeration and omission of pertinent contradictory evidence are acceptable for the holy cause,” wrote Professors Ames and Jukes.
THE FIRST CHARGE AGAINST DDT was that it causes cancer. No search has ever turned up any evidence, despite massive use of DDT in agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s. Wayland Hayes, U.S. Public Health Service scientist, for 18 months, fed to human volunteers, daily, three times the quantity of DDT that the average American was ingesting annually. None experienced any adverse effect, then or six to ten years later.
Workers without wearing protective clothing, with nine to 19 years of continuous exposure to DDT in the Montrose Chemical Company which manufactured DDT, never developed a single case of cancer. DDT caused no illness in the 130,000 men who sprayed it on the interior walls of mud and thatched huts, nor the millions of people who lived in them. Professor Edwards in his classroom occasionally ate a tablespoon of DDT to illustrate to his students that it is not harmful. Indeed, DDT is so safe that canned baby food was permitted to contain five parts per million.
“There has never been any convincing evidence that DDT (or pesticide residues in food) has ever caused cancer in man,” concluded Ames and Jukes.
In fact, DDT prevents cancer. “DDT in the diet has repeatedly been shown to enhance the production of hepatic enzymes in mammals and birds. Those enzymes inhibit tumors and cancers in humans as well as wildlife,” wrote Professor Edwards in 1992.
Unable to find harm to human health, DDT opponents turned to bird health, alleging a decline of bald eagles and other birds of prey, which they associated with heavy DDT usage. Rachel Carson led the accusation. It has been repeated so often and so passionately that the public is still convinced of it.
The charge is that DDT thinned the shells of eggs. When nesting parent birds sat on the eggs, the shells cracked and no babies hatched. Carson charged that DDT was bringing bald eagles and robins to the “verge of extinction” — while noted ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson was reporting that the robin was the most abundant bird in North America.
Bald eagles between 1941 and 1960 migrating over Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, doubled during the first six years of DDT-use. Their numbers increased from 9,291 in 1946 — before much DDT was used — to 16,163 in 1963 and 19,765 in 1968.
Professor Edwards reviews how bald eagles died of non-DDT causes. In Alaska, 128,000 were shot for bounty payments between 1917 and 1956. Between 1960 and 1965, 76 bald eagles found dead were autopsied: 46 had been shot or trapped; 7 had died of impact injuries from flying into buildings or towers. Between 1965 and 1980, shootings, trappings, electrocutions, and impact injuries chiefly accounted for their deaths.
Although some birds declined before DDT, they became much more abundant during the years of greatest DDT-use. But facts have not impeded the endless repetition of Carson’s bird myth.
Scientists tested the popular shell-thinning hypothesis. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists fed birds for 112 days on a diet with 100 times as much DDT as they were getting from the environment. No thinning of egg shells was found. The DDT had no effect on the birds.
One experimenter, to demonstrate eggshell-thinning, fed quail a diet with DDT but containing only one-fifth of the normal amount of calcium. His experiment succeeded in producing thinner eggshells, but his deception was exposed.
IN 1969, THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND (then, three guys with a clipboard; now “Environmental Defense”), Sierra Club, and National Audubon Society petitioned the Secretary of Agriculture to ban DDT, claiming it is carcinogenic to humans. He agreed to partially phase it out by December 31, 1970, which did not satisfy the environmentalists.
The Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council, to stop exports of DDT to third-world countries, instituted a number of lawsuits, ultimately gaining the support of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1977.
EPA appointed Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney to evaluate DDT. In 1971-2 he conducted a seven-month hearing. EPA actually participated, testifying against DDT!
Judge Sweeney, after 80 days of testimony from 150 expert scientists, ruled that DDT “is not a carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic hazard to man” and does “not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wild life. There is a present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case.”
The Environmental Defense Fund appealed Sweeney’s decision. The appeal should have been passed to an independent jurist, according to Ruckelshaus’s general counsel, John Quarles, but Ruckelshaus decided to rule on it himself. Not surprisingly, he upheld his own ban “on the grounds that ‘DDT poses a carcinogenic risk’ to humans.” (In 1994, he was to deny that that was the basis for the ban.) He had banned DDT though he had not attended a day of the 80-day hearing nor read a page of the transcript (as he told the Santa Ana Register, July 23, 1972).
In 1979, on April 26, Ruckelshaus wrote the American Farm Bureau Federation that his ban was imposed for political, not scientific, reasons: “Science, along with other disciplines such as economics, has a role to play, but the ultimate judgment remains political,” he wrote. But in 1994 he wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, “The scientific basis for the ban was solid then and still stands. DDT is a highly persistent chemical that moves up the food chain, and it accumulates in the fatty tissue of humans.” However, according to Professor Edwards, it does no harm. Professor Edwards says that “DDT residues do not ‘build up’ in animal food-chains, because they are metabolized and excreted by fish, birds and mammals.”
In his March 24, 1994 Wall Street Journal letter, Ruckelshaus wrote that the direct ecological effect, and the basis for his decision, “was its proven impact on the thickness of egg shells of raptors, birds such as the brown pelican and the peregrine falcon. The decision was not based on any claim of human carcinogenicity.” But in 1972, he had overridden Judge Sweeney on the ground that DDT does pose a carcinogenic risk to humans.
THE BROWN PELICAN AND the peregrine falcon did suffer declines in population, but not because of DDT, according to Professor Edwards’s article, “DDT Effects on Bird Abundance and Reproduction.”
Brown pelicans suffered, not from fish they ate but from their catastrophic reproductive failure caused by the great Santa Barbara oil spill surrounding their nesting colonies on the island of Anacapa. Federal and California officials ignored the oil spill and attributed pelican difficulties “solely to DDT in the environment.”
In Texas, peregrine falcons declined from 5,000 in 1918 to 200 in 1941, three years before DDT. Around the Gulf of Mexico, they declined from 1918 to 1934 by 82 percent, but the 1935 survey was done 15 years before any DDT appeared.
Likewise, in the East, peregrine falcons declined long before there was any DDT present there, because of egg-collectors and falconers. Falconers “raided every nest they could find” and shot falcons on sight.
Ruckelshaus, besides ruling on the appeal to uphold his own reversal of Sweeney’s decision, refused Freedom-of-Information-Act demands for papers relating to the case — he called them “internal memos” — effectively preventing scientists from refuting his Opinion. He also refused to file an Environmental Impact Statement on the effects of his DDT ban.
In 1970, in a brief supporting the Secretary of Agriculture in the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Ruckelshaus praised DDT: “DDT is not endangering the public health and has an amazing and exemplary record of safe use. DDT, when properly used at recommended concentrations, does not cause a toxic response in man or other mammals and is not harmful. The carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproved speculation.”
Subsequently, Ruckelshaus, alleging adverse effects of DDT, signed fund-raising letters on behalf of the Environmental Defense Fund. On his personal stationery, he wrote, “EDF’s scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won.”
In a January 12, 2005, letter to the editor of the New York Times, Ruckelshaus rose to the plight of the poor by urging more spending. “If the world were to invest on an annual basis even a small percentage of the funds pledged to tsunami relief toward improving health care systems, transportation, infrastructure and communications systems, we would improve the quality of life for millions of poor people around the world . . .” He said nothing about how his ban on DDT was causing the death of millions from malaria.
FOLLOWING RUCKELSHAUS’S BAN, the USAID, prodded by a lawsuit by the Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council, undertook to discourage other countries from using DDT by threatening to stop foreign aid to any country using it. Its threat spread Ruckelshaus’s ban worldwide.
The effects of giving up DDT were immediately felt in the malarial areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Sri Lanka (Ceylon), reacting to Silent Spring, in the 1960s gave up DDT. Its malarial cases had decreased from 2.8 million down to 17. After Sri Lanka gave it up, malaria shot back up to over 2.5 million.
South American countries gave up DDT and suffered the customary rise in malaria. Ecuador, which manufactures DDT, resumed using it in 1993. By 1995, Ecuador had reduced its malarial cases by 61 percent.
Spraying the inside walls of huts with DDT once or twice a year stops the spread of malaria by repelling mosquitoes from huts. USAID agreed, but it determined that insecticide-treated bed nets are “more cost-effective.”
The search for an effective substitute for DDT continues to fail 30 years after the Ruckelshaus ban. The search for a treatment for malaria continues to fail; the mutations of the malaria virus soon make a drug ineffective. The search for a malaria-vaccine continues to fail.
The environmentalists’ ideological opposition to pesticides has no basis in science. It is a death sentence to millions.
The American Spectator Foundation is the 501(c)(3) organization responsible for publishing The American Spectator magazine and training aspiring journalists who espouse traditional American values. Your contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Each donor receives a year-end summary of their giving for tax purposes.
Copyright 2013, The American Spectator. All rights reserved.
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George Tomaich
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EPA Refutes Study Claiming Glyphosate Boosts Cancer Risk By Geoffrey Kabat — February 27, 2020
There is a lot of malicious misinformation on the internet about glyphosate. Much of it comes from academia.
Note: This article is republished with permission from the Genetic Literacy Project. The author, Dr. Geoffrey Kabat, is an ACSH advisor and epidemiologist. The topic of pesticides and glyphosate in particular, is rife with misinformation, much of it purposeful and malicious. Dr. Kabat debunks a particularly atrocious study that ignored data that did not fit with the authors’ hypothesis — one of the hallmarks of junk science.
In early 2019, mainstream press reports on the alleged dangers of Bayer’s Roundup weed killer prominently featured an alarming statistic about the herbicide’s main ingredient glyphosate. “Common weed killer glyphosate increases cancer risk by 41%, study says,” CNN told its readers last February.
Carey Gillam, who is the research director for the anti-GMO group USRTK, which is working closely with the glyphosate plaintiffs, seized the moment to hit the panic button in her article in the UK The Guardian, warning, “Weedkiller ‘raises risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma by 41%’.” Many media outlets and environmental activist groups also uncritically reported this figure as a serious challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) conclusion that glyphosate is probably not carcinogenic.
The source of 41 percent statistic was a controversial February 2019 meta-analysis published in the journal Mutation Research. The article, a reanalysis of the most recent epidemiological data on glyphosate and cancer, suggested there was “a compelling link” between exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), a cancer thousands of plaintiffs suing Bayer blame on their use of Roundup.
The paper attracted harsh criticism from many experts (See my GLP piece 41% glyphosate-cancer increase claim under fire: Did authors of new meta-study deliberately manipulate data or just botch their analysis?), who challenged the authors’ methodology and the conclusions drawn from the analysis.
This criticism went unanswered until last week when senior author of the paper Lianne Sheppard, a Professor at University of Washington’s Departments of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, and Biostatistics, attempted a response in Forbes. Her column, Glyphosate Science is Nuanced. Arguments about it on the Internet? Not so much, published under the heading Perspectives from the cutting edge of science, is a strange document.
Its timing is particularly odd, coming out almost a year to the day after publication of the paper. Given the elapsed time, one might have expected her to acknowledge certain facts and developments that have occurred in the past 12 months. But we got nothing of the sort.
Sheppard began by telling readers how her participation in the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Panel 2016 assessment of glyphosate dragged her into the depths of “politically charged science.” She was “shocked to see that the EPA’s approach to distilling the scientific information obfuscated the evidence.” And she charged the EPA with misinterpreting the animal carcinogenicity studies on glyphosate. Her disagreement with the EPA’s approach is what impelled her and two other Scientific Advisory Panel members to embark on their now controversial meta-analysis.
Since I was the principal object of Sheppard’s displeasure, I will briefly recount my criticism of her paper, then bring in the crucial facts and developments that, inexplicably, Sheppard ignored in her Forbes piece.
Flaws in the meta-analysis
In what follows, I will refer to the meta-analysis, using the name of the first author, as the “Zhang paper.” I read the paper soon after it came out and posted a critique on February 18, 2019 on Forbes.com, where I was a contributor at the time.
Reading the introduction, I noticed how the authors described the “controversy” surrounding glyphosate, suggesting that the two sides in the debate were somehow equivalent. In fact, the two sides are not comparable. Over a dozen international and national health agencies have reviewed the safety of glyphosate, some repeatedly, and have found it unlikely to cause cancer and safe when used according to its label. This misrepresentation of the background set off my baloney detection sensors (the term is Carl Sagan’s).
Next, I noticed the authors seemed inclined to subtly denigrate the results of the only cohort study included in their meta-analysis: the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), a prospective cohort study of 54,000 farmers. They appeared to feel there must be something wrong with the analysis by the National Cancer Institute, because it failed to find any association between exposure to glyphosate and any of more than 20 malignancies, including solid cancers and lymphopoietic cancers such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL)—the subject of the Zhang meta-analysis.
In fact, the AHS is, by far, the highest-quality study we have on the topic. Zhang and colleagues showed no comparably skeptical inclination toward the case-control studies they analyzed, which are far inferior to the AHS. The first problem with the meta-analysis I pointed out was that, to have validity, the studies that were combined must be of comparable quality and use compatible definitions of exposure. Otherwise, one is comparing apples to oranges.
The five other studies included in the meta-analysis were case-control studies. Case-control studies, unlike cohort studies, are subject to recall bias, because cases with a serious disease may think back over their exposures differently from controls, and this may lead to a spurious association. Moreover, unlike the AHS, the five case-control studies were smaller and had a much lower percentage of subjects with exposure to glyphosate.
Furthermore, the definition of exposure differed among the studies—ever exposure in some studies and exposure for three or more days/year and 10 or more days/year in others. Four of the case-control studies reported roughly a doubling of NHL risk with exposure to glyphosate, whereas the fifth study found no association.
Two of the studies were from a research team in Sweden, which reported elevated risks for many associations, and which appear to be outliers. I questioned the value of combining the inferior case-control studies with the vastly superior AHS. A recent paper in the journal Risk Analysis has confirmed the validity of this concern, demonstrating that recall bias and selection bias contributed to spuriously elevated estimates for associations of glyphosate with NHL from case-control studies.
My last criticism of the Zhang paper was this. The AHS reported five different risk estimates for the association of the highest glyphosate exposure level and NHL. Four of these were below 1.0, indicating no association (0.87, 0.87, 0.83, and 0.94). Zhang selected the only relative risk that was above 1.0—the 20-year lagged relative risk of 1.12 (95% CI 0.83-1.51).
Although the authors attempted to justify their use of the 20-year lagged risk estimate with reference to the biology, there is much that we don’t know about the natural history of NHL, and there is considerable evidence suggesting a much shorter induction period. A conservative approach would have been to show what the impact of using differently lagged estimates would have been. Because all of the estimates from the case-control studies included in the Zhang paper were based on unlagged analyses, at the very least, the main meta-analysis should have included the unlagged AHS risk estimate for NHL (0.87).
The point in all this is that the authors, who view themselves as irreproachable, disinterested researchers methodically pursuing their hypothesis, repeatedly made choices that just happened to produce a positive result that bore out their belief that glyphosate is dangerous.
By combining the results of the six studies, the authors obtained a “summary” relative risk estimate of 1.41 (95% confidence interval 1.13-1.75). This result was featured in the abstract of the paper as indicating that people exposed to glyphosate had a 41 percent increased risk of NHL. The authors concluded that that their analysis of human epidemiological studies “suggests a compelling link” between glyphosate and NHL.
I pointed out that if Zhang et al. had used the more appropriate unlagged estimate of 0.87 from the AHS, it was likely that the summary relative risk would have been considerably reduced and no longer statistically significant (a conclusion confirmed by the EPA, as we’ll see below). Of course, in that case, their paper would have attracted little attention.
My Forbes column was carefully worded and, in essence, contained the points made above. On February 19, the day after I posted it, however, it was taken down without any warning or discussion.
Facts ignored by Dr. Sheppard
Dr. Sheppard’s contention that my critique of her study was taken down because I “failed to adhere to Forbes’ editorial standards” is laughable. I had written approximately 80 columns on Forbes over the preceding eight years and had never had any problem. What happened, in fact, is that anti-pesticide, anti-GMO, anti-modern agriculture activist Carey Gillam raised a fuss with the editors, and they spinelessly took down the article and severed my connection to Forbes, without any discussion.
Curiously, in referring to Forbes’ “retraction” of my column, Sheppard parroted the same clueless language Gillam used. This was not a retraction, which, as Sheppard should know, is precipitated by evidence that an article includes serious errors or fabrications. No one has pointed out any error in my article in the year since it was published. This scenario was simply an example of a corporation concerned about its “brand” taking the path of least resistance, rather than standing up for a carefully made argument.
Sheppard also failed to note that my article was republished here and here, but her ploy allowed her to evade acknowledging the substantive criticism in my column.
Now, let’s turn to some of the important developments that Sheppard inexplicably left out of her post. First, Sheppard cited the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which relied on animal carcinogenicity data to declare glyphosate a “probable carcinogen.” However, reporting by award-winning Reuter’s investigative journalist Kate Kelland and a careful reassessment by a former statistician at the National Cancer Institute found irregularities and even fraud in IARC’s evaluation of the animal studies.
A rigorous and complete synthesis of the rodent studies relied upon by IARC does not support the conclusion that glyphosate is an animal carcinogen. As with her research team’s background discussion of the glyphosate controversy, Sheppard’s Forbes column showed no awareness of, or interest in, careful work that doesn’t support her position.
Second, just as Sheppard and coauthors publicized a questionable 41 percent increase in the risk of NHL, she went on to argue that this increased risk, even though linked to a very rare cancer, could account for a significant number of additional cases of cancer. She further argued that there is no safe level of exposure and that people may be harmed by much lower levels. This revives the scare stories about glyphosate residues in Cheerios and other foods, and goes against all the careful risk assessments performed by the agencies I referred to above.
In fact, we have valuable information relevant to this point. The application of glyphosate to crops has increased about 15-fold since Roundup-ready crops were introduced in 1996. What has happened to the rates of NHL over the past 25 years? As shown in the figure below, while the use of glyphosate increased markedly, the incidence of NHL has remained flat, and mortality from NHL has decreased.
Note that 2.1% = 2,100 cases per 100,000.
EPA’s reanalysis of the Zhang Paper
In January 2020, the U.S. EPA issued a memorandum updating its 2017 review of studies of glyphosate.
EPA repeated the Zhang meta-analysis substituting a relative risk of 0.85 (95% CI 0.73-0.99) for unlagged ever exposure in the AHS (instead of 1.12, 95% CI 0.83-1.51 for the highest quartile of glyphosate exposure based on a 20-year lag used in the Zhang analysis). The resulting summary relative risk was 1.14 (95% CI 0.87-1.50). EPA concluded that the reanalysis confirmed its earlier 2017 judgment of no association between glyphosate exposure and NHL.
In addition to Zhang et al.’s selection of the highest hazard ratio in the AHS, the EPA re-review suggested other ways in which Zhang et al. made decisions based on assumptions that had little support in the actual data. Specifically, Zhang et al. emphasized their “a priori hypothesis” that higher exposures to glyphosate-based herbicides would be associated with greater effect sizes, where “higher” was defined as “greater intensity/magnitude, longer duration, or some cumulative combination of the two.” However, EPA pointed out that in the AHS, “the largest study and of the highest quality,”
…. this hypothesis does not appear to be supported …. there is no readily apparent indication of a trend toward higher odds ratios [sic] with higher exposures in Andreotti et al. (2018) so there appears to be little evidence supporting the authors’ stated a priori hypothesis
Here, again, the Zhang paper authors’ judgment seems to have been blinkered by their determination to find evidence supporting their preferred hypothesis. Sheppard’s Forbes post was a belated attempt to neutralize criticism of her meta-analysis, but, as in the paper itself, she preferred to double down on her hypothesis, rather than taking into account the new, high-quality work on the topic.
Sheppard also added that discussion of scientific issues should be confined to the precincts of peer-reviewed journals and letters to the editors of those journals, dismissing commentary on “the internet” as unworthy of a serious response. However, critical problems have been documented in the peer review process, and publication of the Zhang paper shows that highly questionable research can make its way into scientific journals.
The problem is not, as Sheppard tried to convince us, that we have undisciplined and uninformed people addressing scientific issues on social media. Useful and informed criticism is valuable wherever it comes from. Many superb scientists recognize the value of cutting through the medical publishing logjam and writing critical assessments (“tweetorials”) of important articles online. It’s ironic that Sheppard seems completely unaware that she is using social media to discredit the use of social media to discuss scientific issues.
There is an important lesson here. The problem has always been that Sheppard and her co-authors are intent on favoring data that appears to support the existence of a risk from glyphosate exposure, even when the best evidence fails to support the case. Sheppard rejected the charge that she and her co-authors deliberately cherry-picked the data they used in their meta-analysis. I believe her. What is clear, however, is that they were so wedded to their hypothesis and so certain that there must be some signal in the data that they selected estimates according to their hypothesis, while ignoring data that did not fit.
It’s worth mentioning that Sheppard and I were scheduled to discuss the glyphosate-NHL question on Pasedena’s NPR affiliate KPCC on August 13, 2019. A couple of hours before the broadcast, I got a phone call informing me that she had dropped out.
The only surprise about her column is that Sheppard is so unaware of the biases she displays at every turn, and that she could try to justify her paper, which only last month was reviewed carefully by the EPA and revised in a well-conducted and consistent meta-analysis showing no evidence of an association between glyphosate exposure and NHL.
Geoffrey Kabat is an ACSH advisor, cancer epidemiologist, and the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology and Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. He is a GLP board member. Follow him on Twitter @GeoKabat
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