Showing posts with label Herbicide. Show all posts

Thursday, December 17, 2015

The court of appeals in Lyon, France, has found agribusiness giant Monsanto guilty of poisoning a man named Paul François.

By WakingTimes December 14, 2015

Court Finds Monsanto Responsible for Poisoning French Farmer

Alex Pietrowski, Staff.

Waking Times

The court of appeals in Lyon, France, has found agribusiness giant Monsanto guilty of poisoning a man named Paul François. François is a farmer who claimed that he suffered a multitude of ailments, including headaches, memory loss, neurological problems and stammering, after he unintentionally inhaled Monsanto’s herbicide, Lasso.

François used Lasso for over 15 years, and in 2004 accidentally inhaled the product. After the incident, the farmer began getting severe headaches and experienced moments of mental absence and an inability to speak.

The chemical’s effects on François were so severe that he fainted, was hospitalized and fell into a coma. François was diagnosed with monochlorobenzene poisoning by his doctors, who found that the chemical permanently damaged his brain. Monochlorobenzene makes up 50% of the herbicide Lasso.
It is worth noting that the herbicide was prohibited in France and the rest of the European Union in 2007, and at the time of the incident, it was already banned in Canada (since 1985), Great Britain and Belgium (since 1992).

During the court hearing, Monsanto’s attorneys repeatedly claimed that the herbicide Lasso was not dangerous. François claimed that the company was aware of the toxic nature of the herbicide but failed to adequately warn about the potential health risks.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Monsanto’s Cancer Causing Herbicide Doesn’t Even Work, Actually Makes Weeds Stronger

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Environment · News

TrueActivist.com.

September 24, 2015 by John Vibes

As we have covered extensively in recent months, Monsanto’s herbicide Glysophate, the primary ingredient in their top-selling product “RoundUp” has been proven to cause cancer. Now, according to new reports, the chemical doesn’t even work and is creating a new resistance in weeds that make them more resiliant and more difficult to get rid of.

Nebraska farmer Mike Pietzyk recently discussed how the weeds are becoming resistant to RoundUp in a recent interview with Chemicals And Engineers News.

“The days of going out and spraying RoundUp twice a year—those are long gone,” he said, adding that he was forced to use a cocktail of different chemicals, some of which are even more dangerous than RoundUp. Pietzyk and other farmers are now seeking new solutions to avoid the harsh pesticides used in conventional farming.

“People in urban areas and towns need to understand—we live here, we drink the water under the ground out here,” he says. “We want to be good stewards of what we’ve been entrusted with,” he said.

According to U.S. weed scientist Dallas Peterson, one type of weed, in particular, called Palmer amaranth, has become especially resistant to pesticides and is overgrowing farms across the country.
Complaints of herbicide-resistant weeds have become so common that the House Agriculture Committee has scheduled a meeting on December 4th to specifically address the situation.

Roundup, formulated to be used on GMO or “Roundup Ready” crops engineered to be resistant to it, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It was originally introduced in the 1970s to control weeds and then took off when the planting of GMO crops skyrocketed in the past 15 years.

According to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), glyphosate use in the U.S. increased from about 20 million pounds in 1992 to 110 million pounds in 2002 to more than 280 million pounds in 2012.
In a statement released earlier this year, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that glyphosate, the main ingredient in RoundUp, is “probably carcinogenic.”

John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Monsanto's Roundup may be linked to fatal kidney disease, new study suggests

Published time: February 27, 2014 01:20

A farmer tills a rice paddy field on the outskirts of Colombo, Sri Lanka (Reuters / Andrew Caballero-Reynolds)

A heretofore inexplicable fatal, chronic kidney disease that has affected poor farming regions around the globe may be linked to the use of biochemical giant Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide in areas with hard water, a new study has found.
The new study was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Researchers suggest that Roundup, or glyphosate, becomes highly toxic to the kidney once mixed with “hard” water or metals like arsenic and cadmium that often exist naturally in the soil or are added via fertilizer. Hard water contains metals like calcium, magnesium, strontium, and iron, among others. On its own, glyphosate is toxic, but not detrimental enough to eradicate kidney tissue.
The glyphosate molecule was patented as a herbicide by Monsanto in the early 1970s. The company soon brought glyphosate to market under the name “Roundup,” which is now the most commonly used herbicide in the world.
The hypothesis helps explain a global rash of the mysterious, fatal Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown etiology (CKDu) that has been found in rice paddy regions of northern Sri Lanka, for example, or in El Salvador, where CKDu is the second leading cause of death among males.
Furthermore, the study’s findings explain many observations associated with the disease, including the linkage between the consumption of hard water and CKDu, as 96 percent of patients have been found to have consumed “hard or very hard water for at least five years, from wells that receive their supply from shallow regolith aquifers.”

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