Scientists Confirm Potent Hormone Disrupting Effects

Latest evidence confirms world's top-selling herbicide used with GM crops is toxic and disrupts sex hormones at infinitesimal doses; time for a worldwide ban.

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho from London-based The Institute of Science in Society said that this report has been submitted to the US Environment Protection Agency. Glyphosate is the world's top selling herbicide, and Monsanto's formulations Roundup is used with more than 80 percent of all genetically modified (GM) crops grown globally.

But evidence of its extreme toxicity has been emerging within the past decade. Glyphosate was found to kill human placental cells at concentrations below that
recommended for agricultural use and approved by our regulators, while Roundup was lethal at even lower concentrations. The herbicide has already been linked with spontaneous abortions, Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma in humans; and in laboratory studies glyphosate caused liver damage in rats. Roundup is also highly lethal to amphibians.

Recently, the research team led by Giles-Eric Séralini at Caen University in France confirmed the lethality of glyphosate and Roundup formulations to human cells at minute
concentrations (down to parts per million, ppm). They also identified three main targets for killing cells: damage to the cell membrane, poisoning of energy metabolism
in the mitochondria, and programmed cell death involving fragmentation of nuclear DNA.

Séralini's team joined up with colleagues at the University of Burgundy in Dijon and have now demonstrated that the herbicide and its Roundup formulations disrupt the action and synthesis of sex hormones at even lower concentrations.

Glyphosate-based herbicides are now major pollutants of rivers and surface waters. Commercial glyphosate formulations contain a number of different ‘adjuvants' that
are supposed to be ‘inert', but such cocktail mixtures typically exert synergistic, multiplicative and other nonlinear effects, much more potent than the separate
ingredients. Unfortunately, typical toxicology tests are still carried out on individual ingredients, if at all

Not surprisingly, the question of active toxic threshold of the combinations of glyphosate and adjuvants in different formations in vivo is still open, but as Séralini and
colleagues state, “it is now well demonstrated that mixtures formulated with G [glyphosate] and adjuvants are themselves not environmentally safe, in particular for
aquatic life. They can even enhance heavy metals toxicity.” (EOM)