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How Monsanto’s Roundup Affects The Fish You Eat

  • Spence Cooper
  • August 15, 2012

In a July report published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessments, new research on the DNA-damaging effects of the herbicide known as Roundup® indicates that it can do significant harm to fish even after short-term, environmentally low concentration exposures in the parts per billion.

Activist Post contributor Sayer Ji claims researchers evaluated the genotoxic effects that the herbicide Roundup®, and its primary ingredient glyphosate, can have on a species of catfish known as Corydorasa paleatus.

When exposed to minute concentrations of Roundup for 3,6 and 9 days, the following effects were observed:

“[T]he comet assay showed a high rate of DNA damage in group exposed to Roundup(®) for all treatment times, both for blood and hepatic cells.”

The researchers summarized their findings:

“We conclude that for the low concentration used in this research, the herbicide shows potential genotoxic effects. Future research will be important in evaluating the effects of this substance, whose presence in the environment is ever-increasing.”

Sayer explains how vital it is to understand just how low a parts per billion concentration is.

“One way to visualize it is to think of one drop in one billion drops of water, or what amounts to one drop of water in an entire swimming pool.”

Because glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has been found in most U.S. air and rain samples, as well as 41% of 140 groundwater samples collected from Catalonia Spain, Sayer warns this new finding has profound implications for environmental and human health alike.

With over 88,000 tons of glyphosate used in the US in 2007, and with an expanding volume being applied to increasingly glyphosate-resistant GM crops, the problem of exposure is only going to get worse.

Of all the adverse health effects, writes Sayer, the genotoxicity (DNA-damaging) of glyphosate is the most concerning, and the most consistently supported by the evidence. DNA-damage has, in fact, been considered the primary factor in carcinogenesis for well over half a century.

How Monsanto’s Roundup Affects The Fish You Eat

Sayer suggests Monsanto has been ramping up its funding of privately contracted published research refuting the accumulating glyphosate/Roundup-cancer connection, precisely because accumulating research indicates Monsanto’s most popular herbicide is contributing to cancer, and that all GM-produced food which is engineered “Roundup Ready” and saturated with glyphosate residues is a cancer risk.

Sayer writes:

“While the pseudo-scientific technocratic dictatorship holds the ‘weight of the evidence’ toxicological risk assessment standard against exposed populations, compelling them to prove that the harms of agrochemicals to human and environmental health outweigh their purported benefits, those of us with a modicum of common sense, and even a layman’s understanding of the precautionary principle, can vote with our forks and dollars and stop spending our money on GM-containing and/or GM-assocciated foods and products.”

While I share Sayer’s concerns and protest advice, voting with our forks and dollars is virtually impossible since Monsanto has managed to insert their GM food products in most processed foods and even condiments. The only escape is a strict diet of nothing but locally grown, organic food, grown and harvested by yourself or a trusted farmer.

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