The Case For
Illawarra Mercury
Friday May 30, 2008
DEAN Facility of Land and Food Resources, University of Melbourne.
Training in pesticide toxicology and genetics, published extensively on toxicology.* The concerns of safety that have been raised are really misplaced ... Overwhelming evidence submitted by scientific authorities around the world say it is a very safe herbicide.* Some years ago ... the Total Environment Centre in Sydney indicated in one of its publications that if you had to use a herbicide for weed control, Roundup would be the herbicide of choice because of its safety to the environment and people.* A review article in the US a few years ago (by epidemiologists at the University of Washington, the National Cancer Institute) ... concluded the herbicide was quite safe. No herbicide or pesticide should be treated casually but essentially one of the concluding sentences was glyphosate was not associated with cancer incidents.* It is as safe as table salt when measured by short-term tests. There are some unfortunate cases where people have swallowed Roundup, one of those was written up in a Japanese medical journal and they concluded the treatment was much like patients who had accidentally ingested shampoo.* Turning to the long-term studies, they were unable to find any cancer effects either.
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