The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared that glyphosate is not carcinogenic to humans. A controversial conclusion.
According to’US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), glyphosate is not carcinogenic to humans. “There is no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer,” said Alexander Dunn, an agency official in charge of chemical safety and pollution prevention. “The use of glyphosate does not pose a risk to public health,” says the agency, which claims that even “children are safe to play on a treated residential lawn.”
11,200 lawsuits in the United States
Several recent decisions of the American justice however considered the opposite. A plaintiff who claimed that Roundup, the glyphosate-based herbicide from Monsanto (a subsidiary of Bayer), was the cause of his cancer, for example, received 80 million dollars in damages. Currently, the chemical is the subject of 11,200 lawsuits in the United States.
This announcement from the EPA confirms the conclusions of a previous report, published in September 2017, following decades of study. Also according to the agency, the research would be more extensive than the previous ones carried out on Monsanto’s flagship product.
Nevertheless, the EPA acknowledges that the chemical has environmental consequences and suggests that labels state that aerial spraying cannot take place more than 3 meters above crops, or if the wind exceeds 24 km/ h.
In France, the use of glyphosate is still legal
the International Cancer Center (IARC), which depends on the WHO, since 2015 classifies glyphosate among the products “probably carcinogenic to humans”. In France, the use of glyphosate is still legal, much to the chagrin of environmentalists. Alternative solutions are however being explored by the government. “I know that there are some who would like us to ban everything overnight. I tell you: one, not feasible, and it would kill our agriculture. And even in three years we will not do 100%, we don’t ‘will get there, I think, not,” President Emmanuel Macron recently declared, going against one of his personal commitments. Since 1er January, individuals can in any case no longer buy and hold a product with glyphosate.
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