The reputation of Roundup, whose active ingredient is the world’s most widely used weed killer, took a hit on Tuesday when a federal court unsealed documents raising questions about its safety and the research practices of its manufacturer, the chemical giant Monsanto.
Roundup and similar products are used around the world on everything from row crops to home gardens. It is Monsanto’s flagship product, and industry-funded research has long found it to be relatively safe. A case in federal court in San Francisco has challenged that conclusion, building on the findings of an international panel that claimed Roundup’s main ingredient might cause cancer.
The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Files unsealed by Judge Vince Chhabria, who is presiding over litigation in federal court in San Francisco brought by people who claim to have developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a result of exposure to glyphosate suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten circular research papers.
(The litigation was touched off by a determination made nearly two years ago by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate was a probable carcinogen, citing research linking it to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.)
Roundup Lawsuits Raise Doubts About EPA’s Integrity
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – A recently unsealed brief in the nation’s largest lawsuit over whether chemical giant Monsanto’s Roundup causes cancer shows the extent to which the company tried to influence academic literature, and casts doubt on the procedural integrity of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In short, the unsealed documents indicate Monsanto ghostwrote and funded two major studies which concluded a lack of evidence that chemicals in Roundup, are carcinogenic. That previous studies which came to similar conclusions about the safety of Roundup – and were referenced repeatedly by authors of the two more current studies and by the EPA in its own paper – Were all ghostwritten by Monsanto.