The United States Environmental Protection Agency has (finally) announced its conclusion that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Round-Up, is likely not a carcinogen. The proposed position will be reviewed next month by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) Scientific Advisory Panel. A final opinion will be released next year.
For those trying to keep up, let’s do a quick recap.
In early 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an agency nestled under the World Health Organization, made a puzzling conclusion when it announced that it was classifying glyphosate as a probable carcinogen. But since that time, numerous governmental agencies and groups of scientists have reached the opposite conclusion.
Those entities include the European Food Safety Authority, the Intertek Panel, the Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Authority, and New Zealand poison experts. They have all concluded that glyphohsate is not likely a carcinogen. Perhaps most embarrassing for IARC is that its parent organization, the World Health Organization, also concluded that glyphosate is not a likely carcinogen.
Now, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has also reached the same conclusion.
Interestingly, the announcement came late on a Friday afternoon. Typically, that means someone wants the story to be buried over the weekend and have no one notice. The idea isn’t completely off the wall since the EPA originally released its paper making the same conclusion in May, but then retracted it claiming the release was a mistake. Meanwhile, it appeared that there may have been some political colluding going on behind the scenes. No doubt the EPA wanted to bury the headlines over the weekend so as to avoid raising a stink by activists.
Nonetheless, we have the announcement and the conclusion that, quite frankly, we were expecting. IARC is looking just plain wrong.
