Atrazine

---

see rfk maha 7 25 both corps out of business?

see hayes

see Syngenta, tag syngnta, 12/15 tag atz has timeline

SEE MILLOY

===

---

For Immediate Release, August 15, 2025

MAHA Commission Succumbs to Pesticide Industry Pressure

*Draft Report Walks Back Administration’s Promises of Bold Action on Pesticides

WASHINGTON— A much-anticipated draft action plan from the Make America Healthy Again Commission eliminated any plans for action on pesticides. This report is the follow up to the commission’s May MAHA report, which included pesticides and specifically named both glyphosate and atrazine.

The threat of any new restrictions being placed on the use of dangerous pesticides spurred a massive and successful lobbying effort by the chemical industry and commodity growers’ groups, alongside their friends in Congress and the EPA, to force the commission to back off. Instead of action, the recommendations direct the EPA and Big Ag to work together to convince the public to have confidence in pesticide review processes, which are broadly criticized for scientific inadequacy and excessive industry influence. It also encourages research into new pesticide application technologies

“Despite the administration’s promises to MAHA and the reality that using a billion pounds of pesticides in the U.S. each year is a major threat to public health, pesticide interests again prevailed in protecting their profits,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Big Ag’s success in steamrolling the commission’s attempt to act on pesticides is a gut punch to everyone who genuinely believed we could finally make progress on protecting children’s health from these poisons.”

More than 300 million pounds of glyphosate and 70 million pounds of atrazine are used by U.S. farmers annually. Thousands of lawsuits have been filed by cancer victims who used Roundup, which contains glyphosate. Atrazine, a powerful endocrine disruptor that contaminates the drinking water of 40 million Americans, is so toxic it is banned in more than 60 countries.

The United States allows use of 85 pesticides that have been banned or are being phased out in the European Union, China or Brazil, according to a peer-reviewed study published by the academic journal Environmental Health. Over a quarter of all agricultural pesticide use in this country includes pesticides banned in the European Union.

“The MAHA Commission is insulting the intelligence of Americans. It’s outlandish to recommend solving our pesticide woes by having the EPA and Big Ag try to convince us that the deeply flawed pesticide regulatory process is working just fine,” said Burd. “While Big Ag won this battle, the powerful grassroots movement of millions of Americans who know that these chemicals are making us sick will continue fighting to protect their families from pesticides like glyphosate and atrazine.”

Some of the strongest resistance against action on pesticides appears to have come from the administration’s political appointees in the EPA’s chemical safety office. Widespread reporting has pointed a finger at Nancy Beck, a former executive with the American Chemistry Council who, after diligently serving pesticide interests in Trump’s first administration, has been brought back as principal deputy assistant administrator overseeing the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety. Another American Chemistry Council veteran, Lynn Ann Dekleva, is also back at the EPA, serving as deputy assistant administrator for new chemicals.

More recently, the administration appointed well-known MAHA critic and American Soybean Association lobbyist Kyle Kunkler as deputy assistant administrator for pesticides at the EPA. Just one month after Kunkler’s arrival at the EPA, the agency proposed to reapprove over-the-top use of dicamba, a highly controversial pesticide that Kunkler lobbied for extensively in his former position.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly stated that many of the most-used pesticides in the United States are “extraordinarily toxic,” including and organophosphates. He has that pesticides — many of which have scientifically well-documented links to cancer, infertility, obesity and developmental disorders — are significant contributors to chronic health problems faced by people across the nation.

Following his reelection Trump expressed his own concerns that the United States continues spending “billions and billions of dollars on pesticides,” compared to the European Union and yet has far worse health outcomes. He pledged that his administration would “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, [and] pesticides.”

As part of that pledge, he nominated Kennedy as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services with a mandate to “go wild on the food.” Trump stated that Kennedy is “looking into [pesticides] very seriously because maybe it's not necessary to use all of that.”

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.8 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.}:

---

maha?

health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raised his concerns about widely used herbicides containing glyphosate and atrazine, linking them to chronic disease, in a Thursday report by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission.

Why It Matters

The report highlights two commonly used weed killers—glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, and atrazine, another widely used herbicide for weed control.

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans." But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has reviewed and reevaluated its status, said in 2020, "glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen." There are conflicting opinions about the toxicity of pesticides and their potential health risks, as well as their impact on the food system and environment. Herbicides are classified as a type of pesticide.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which pledged to produce a report within the president's first few months back in office. The assessment, released Thursday, aims to lay the groundwork for understanding what Kennedy calls the "magnitude of crisis" in American children's declining health and the factors driving it.

As the nation's top health official, Kennedy has repeatedly raised concerns about chemicals in food and the environment and their connection to chronic disease. The report's first section focuses on the rise of ultra-processed foods, while the second addresses the "cumulative load of chemicals in our environment."

What To Know

The 69-page assessment took issue with common herbicides, saying that children are exposed to them through food, water, dust, lawn treatment and household sprays.

"The cumulative effect of multiple chemical exposures and impact on children over time is not fully understood," the report says, adding that data and research on the "complex mixtures of chemicals" children encounter have yet to be fully explored.

Kennedy has long opposed pesticides, having helped win a 2018 lawsuit filed against Monsanto, the original producer of Roundup.

Pesticides are widely used in farming across the U.S. In April, a group of 79 Republicans, including some Senators like Chuck Grassley of Iowa, wrote a letter to Kennedy, saying that "regular testing by DFA and USDA finds that more than 99% of all pesticide residues meet extremely conservative limits established by EPA."

As of 2017, the United States Geological Survey reported, "about 1 billion pounds of conventional pesticides are used each year" throughout the country.

Is the FDA Doing Enough About Food Additives?

### 'Disabling' Chronic Illness in Children Not Taken Seriously: Experts

The MAHA Commission's assessment received expected blowback from agricultural and farming associations, which largely rely on pesticides for their livelihood.

What People Are Saying

The National Corn Growers Association said in a statement:"The Make America Healthy Again Report is filled with fear-based rather than science-based information about pesticides. We are deeply troubled that claims of this magnitude are being made without any scientific basis or regard for a long history of EPA expert evaluations of these products."

American Soybean Association said in a statement: "The American Soybean Association strongly rebukes the May 22 Make America Healthy Again Commission report for being brazenly unscientific and damaging to consumer confidence in America's safe, reliable food system. Should the administration act on the report—which was drafted entirely behind closed doors—it will harm U.S. farmers, increase food costs for consumers, and worsen health outcomes for all Americans. ASA calls on President Trump, who has long been a friend of farmers, to step in and correct the Commission's deeply misguided report."

Dr. Michelle Perro, pediatrician, author and activist for children's health, told The New Lede: "While I support and applaud the MAHA focus on chronic diseases affecting our children, it is disheartening that it took us decades to get here. The environmental toxic impacts on our children's well-being has been known for decades, but not acted upon until now."

The National Council of Farmer Cooperatives said in a Thursday statement:"We have serious concerns over the assessment's allegations about pesticides. The report includes statements that do not reflect the wealth of evidence developed over decades by federal agencies such as the EPA and USDA on the safety of crop inputs and food production methods. These institutions have consistently reaffirmed the safety and efficacy of the systems that help feed our country and the world."

American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall said in a statement:"It is deeply troubling for the White House to endorse a report that sows seeds of doubt and fear about our food system and farming practices, then attempts to celebrate farmers and the critical role they play in producing the safest food supply in the world.

Farmers are identified as 'critical partners,' yet were excluded from development of the report, despite many requests for a seat at the table. The report also expresses a desire to ensure farmers continue to thrive, but undermining confidence in our food system directly contradicts that noble goal. The report spotlights outlier studies and presents unproven theories that feed a false narrative and only then does it acknowledge a mountain of evidence about the safety of our food system." zippy

What Happens Next

The report pledges to support "gold-standard scientific research" as part of its effort to address chronic disease. The assessment marks the first step toward developing the commission's strategy, which is due 180 days after Trump's February executive order establishing the panel.

===

https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/Atrazine-renewal-moves-forward-US/97/web/2019/12

industry

Atrazine renewal moves forward in the US

Regulators propose slight changes to widely used herbicide

by Britt E. Erickson

DECEMBER 20, 2019

The US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to renew approval of the herbicide atrazine, with a few modifications. The agency claims that the changes will reduce exposure to the chemical, which has been linked to developmental and reproductive toxicity in aquatic organisms and people. Environmental groups, however, argue that the proposed changes will weaken protections for aquatic organisms and human children.

Atrazine is a chlorotriazine herbicide widely used on corn, sorghum, and sugarcane in the US to control grasses and broadleaf weeds. The EPA concluded in a draft assessment in 2016 that the pesticide poses reproductive risks to aquatic plants, fish, amphibians, mammals, birds, and reptiles. In a 2018 draft assessment, the agency concluded that cumulative exposure to atrazine from food, drinking water, and residential uses poses reproductive and developmental risks to humans, particularly children.

To mitigate the risks to humans, the EPA proposes mandatory spray drift controls and a reduction in the amount of atrazine that can be applied to residential lawns and turf. Environmental groups say that will not be enough to protect children. Instead, they are urging the EPA to ban all residential uses of atrazine.

Environmental groups also point out that the EPA’s proposal will allow more atrazine to enter US waterways by increasing the level of concern for aquatic organisms from 10 ppb to 15 ppb. “It’s absolutely shameful that while other countries are banning atrazine, the Trump administration is opening up the tap,” Nathan Donley, a scientist with the advocacy groupCenter for Biological Diversity, says in a statement. “This disgusting backward step ignores decades of research and will inflict untold damage on people, wildlife and waters across the country.”

In contrast, farm groups welcome the proposed changes. “We appreciate the EPA’s proposal to re-register atrazine,” Gary Marshall, CEO of the Missouri Corn Growers Association and chair of the Triazine Network, says in a statement released by the EPA. “This product is tremendously important to farmers across the country, especially for weed control in conservation practices.”

Chemical & Engineering News

ISSN 0009-2347

https://www.**heartland**.org/news-opinion/news/minnesota-house-weeds-out-atrazine-bills?source=policybot

mINNESOTA HOUSE WEEDS OUT ATRAZINE BILLS

MAY 1, 2005

By Greg McConnell

The Minnesota House Agriculture Committee rejected three bills that would have banned or restricted use of the farm herbicide atrazine, reported Minnesota Public Radio on March 17.

The Minnesota House Agriculture Committee rejected three bills that would have banned or restricted use of the farm herbicide atrazine, reported Minnesota Public Radio on March 17. The news was met with a collective sigh of relief by many Minnesota farmers, who rely on atrazine as one of their main cornfield herbicides to kill weeds.

Atrazine, in use in the U.S. for about five decades, is inexpensive and very effective in relatively small amounts. One of the bills would have banned atrazine in certain parts of the state as early as next year and would have phased out the herbicide completely, statewide, by 2008.

Proponents of the anti-atrazine bills had argued traces of the pesticide found in state drinking water may cause sexual deformities in frogs and could pose a cancer risk to humans. The anti-atrazine bills failed, opponents said, because the science behind such claims is highly controversial and has yet to gain credibility.

Science Debunks Atrazine Fears

In 2002, University of California-Berkeley researcher Tyrone Hayes claimed exposure to very low levels of atrazine can disrupt hormones and cause aberrant sexual development in male African clawed frogs. Hayes followed that with a study finding atrazine appears to make leopard frogs--the most common native American frog--hermaphrodites in the wild.

While studies conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2003 also found that atrazine leads to sexual deformities in frogs, EPA currently says atrazine is safe and has questioned Hayes' findings.

Steven Milloy, publisher of the environmental Web site junkscience.com, recently reported the flaws of the sexual deformities claims. Explained Milloy, "EPA staff prepared a 'White Paper on Potential Developmental Effects of Atrazine on Amphibians,' concluding in bureaucrat-ese that the Hayes-induced panic is unfounded: 'the available data do not establish a concordance of information to indicate that atrazine will or will not cause adverse developmental effects in amphibians.'"

In November 2002, recalled Milloy, Hayes published more laboratory results claiming low concentrations of atrazine were linked to frog deformities.

"But Hayes' results were contradicted by a basic law of toxicology: The higher the dose, the greater the rate or severity of toxic effects," noted Milloy. "Hayes reported that frogs exposed to 0.1 ppb (part per billion) of atrazine had triple the deformities of frogs exposed to 25 ppb of atrazine. The EPA states in its White Paper: '[Hayes'] data did not show a clear dose-response relationship.'"

Milloy continued, "Summarizing Hayes' and other atrazine studies, the EPA states: 'none of the laboratory studies fully accounted for environmental and animal husbandry factors capable of influencing endpoints which the studies were attempting to measure. ... [P]oor water quality (e.g., low dissolved oxygen, high ammonia) could have created environmental conditions unfavorable to optimum survival, growth and development.'"

Atrazine Levels Low

The February 21 St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Minnesota's agriculture department found small amounts of atrazine in only four of 71 drinking water wells in the state's agricultural region last year. The highest level was 1.52 ppb, below the current federal limit of 3 ppb for municipal drinking water.

"We have seen, over time, a statistically significant decrease in concentrations of atrazine in monitoring wells in those sandy areas,'' Greg Buzicky, director of agronomy and plant protection for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, told the Pioneer Press, referring to the agricultural areas of Minnesota where atrazine tends to be used.

Legislators Pointing Fingers

Both sides have accused the other of avoiding sensible debate in order to play politics with the issue.

A year ago, the European Union banned atrazine in its member states. However, Syngenta, the Swiss-based manufacturer of atrazine, vigorously backs its product's safety and says it meets EPA requirements. The use of atrazine, Syngenta spokeswoman Sherry Ford told the Pioneer Press, is "a science issue that has made the leap into the political realm."

Rep. Jean Wagenius (D-Minneapolis) tried to attach atrazine-testing language to an ethanol bill earlier this year. Since the bill would encourage corn production and atrazine use, she said the legislature shouldn't pass it without more discussion about atrazine's possible effects, reported the Pioneer Press.

The newspaper continued, "The chairman of the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee, however, wouldn't let her introduce her amendment. Rep. Tom Hackbarth, R-Cedar, said it wasn't appropriate because, among other things, her amendment didn't pertain to the bill."

Wagenius told the Pioneer Press that Hackbarth's ruling was the first time in her 19 years on the committee that anything like that had happened to her.

"'Groundwater is clearly within the jurisdiction of the environment committee,' Wagenius insisted. 'It seems they were very desperate not to talk about it.'"

Greg McConnell (gjmc90@yahoo.com) is a Chicago-based freelance reporter and columnis

1119

good

The Environmental Protection Agency will evaluate the effects of eight pesticides on endangered plant and animal species, thanks to a legal settlement with two environmental groups, reports the Arizona Daily Star. The included compounds includeatrazine, one of the most-used herbicides in the country, which EPA itself, in 2016, deemed extremely dangerous to aquatic ecosystems. The reviews could, conceivably, lead to these pesticides being taken off the market, if they’re found to “either jeopardize a species’ existence or destroy or otherwise illegally damage its prime habitat.”

https://thewalrus.ca/big-agro-on-campus/

no lnx

FEATURE / MAY 2017

Big Agro on Campus

Universities claim industry-funded research on chemical and pesticide safety is scientifically sound. Not everybody is convinced

BY BRUCE LIVESEY

ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE CAREY

Updated 16:21, Jul. 8, 2019 | Published 11:39, Apr. 11, 2017

IN EARLY 2014, New Brunswick’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was facing a crisis. Rod Cumberland, former chief deer biologist for the province, had been waging a media and letter-writing campaign to draw attention to an unfolding disaster in the province’s forests—namely, the collapse of the white-tail deer population, which had dropped to 70,000 from a peak of 286,000 in 1985.

[Podcast

Cumberland was convinced that he had identified the culprit:glyphosate, the world’s most popular weed killer, which is sold primarily by Monsanto, an agrochemical multinational. Glyphosate is sprayed on 15,000 hectares of New Brunswick’s Crown land each year, and Cumberland believes the herbicide is wiping out the animal’s food source. “Each white-tail eats about a ton of food a year,” he explains, “so we were basically removing enough food to feed 32,000 of them annually.”

Cumberland’s charges placed the province in a bind. The government uses glyphosate to stunt the growth of hardwood trees—which the deer feed on—making it easier for the forest industry to grow softwood trees that can be turned into lumber. The chemical therefore sits at the very centre of one of the province’s most important industries. Internal emails from 2014 show senior provincial DNR bureaucrats scrambling to respond to Cumberland, at one point sharing damage-control suggestions from J. D. Irving Ltd., New Brunswick’s largest forestry company. Eventually, they hit upon a solution: find scientists who could defend glyphosate to the public.

Among the experts they enlisted was Len Ritter, a toxicologist from the University of Guelphwell known for his claims that the dangers of pesticides and herbicides are misrepresented. Ritter was touted as one of three go-to scientists on a pro-glyphosate website sponsored by the New Brunswick government and forest companies. Last year, he and the others were sent to cities and towns across both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, where they made presentations and answered questions from local residents about the provincial herbicide-spraying programs. At the public forums, the scientists argued that the decline in deer had been caused by harsh winters and coyotes. (Cumberland counters that deer populations in Maine and Quebec face the same climate challenges and predators, yet haven’t plunged as dramatically.)

By this time, Cumberland’s criticisms had helped spur a popular no-spraying movement, which was attracting thousands of petition signatures and setting up protests. His focus had shifted to glyphosate’s health and environmental impact. In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—an advisory arm of the World Health Organization (WHO)—concluded that the chemical is a “probable carcinogen.”

One month after the IARC issued its decision, Cumberland sent a list of studies to the New Brunswick government that detailed the herbicide’s dangers. In December 2015, he received a lengthy response from Ritter, who argued that the studies weren’t supported by reviews carried out by “major regulatory authorities,” and that glyphosate did not pose an unacceptable risk to human health. “I would advise that much of my attached commentary is not simply my personal opinion but rather is drawn from the recent [federal government] and EU reviews of the safety of glyphosate,” he wrote. Ritter copied the deputy minister of natural resources on the email, which was sent from his University of Guelph account.

A Fellow of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences, Ritter is one of Canada’s leading experts on the effects of pesticides and herbicides on humans, and was awarded a medal by the WHO in 2006, in recognition of his contributions as an advisor to the organization.

But Ritter also has a history of championing some of the industry’s most controversial agrochemical products.Critics such as Green Party leader Elizabeth May have accused him of having supported a dioxin-laced pesticide linked to Agent Orange while he was at Health Canada in the early 1980s—a pesticide whose sales, by 1979, had been suspended in the United States. In 1994, while on unpaid leave from his position as the director of what is now Health Canada’s Veterinary Drugs Directorate, Ritter testified during a parliamentary comittee hearing that bovine growth hormone, which boosts milk production, was “99.9 percent” safe (the government eventually decided against allowing its use in Canada). In 2015, the Prince Edward Island Potato Board flew him to Charlottetown to address fears that the pesticides being used by farmers were a cancer threat. Environmental activist Sharon Labchuk called him a “pesticide proponent” in a letter to PEI’s Journal Pioneer. “Ritter,” she claimed, “says pesticides are too difficult for the average Canadian to understand, that we should quit worrying and leave it up to the experts.”

Industry-funded scientists often demand an incredibly high standard of proof before they will accept something as toxic.

The fact that Ritter is a professor emeritus of environmental toxicology at the University of Guelph comes as no surprise to his detractors. Located in the city of Guelph, one hour west of Toronto, the university—nicknamed “Moo U”—is Canada’s top agricultural school and home to more than 20,000 students. Opened in 1874 on a farm provided by the province of Ontario, the university remains focused on supplying graduates for the agricultural, farming, forestry, and veterinary industries. This, inevitably, has meant that the school often teams up with the companies that dominate those sectors, forming partnerships that have paid dividends for the institution, which today claims to attract more research dollars per capita than any other comprehensive university in Canada. Indeed, as part of a push to make academic research more relevant in the marketplace, Ontario’s agriculture ministry—headquartered on campus—has ramped up its co-sponsorship of private sector–funded projects. Scientists are graded on the amount of outside investment they secure.

Academic critics warn that the arrangement is a Faustian bargain. Faculty members, they say, are being recruited by agrochemical giants to undermine criticisms levelled at their products, and therefore help keep potentially dangerous chemicals on the market.

ABOUT 3 BILLION kilograms of pesticides are sprayed across the globe annually; these chemicals constitute a $60 billion (US) market, and that number is expected to increase by one-third by 2019. In Canada, 100 million kilograms of pesticides were sold in 2014—up nearly 15 percent from five years earlier. Given the widespread use of these chemicals, it’s critical that agrochemical companies prove to regulatory agencies that their products are safe.

Every year, Monsanto, Bayer CropScience, BASF, and DuPont collectively spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at the University of Guelphon research projects largely designed to examine the environmental and health impacts of their compounds. The university has done its best to welcome this money. It has built a sprawling six-acre research park on its grounds that has housed offices for Monsanto, Syngenta, and dozens of other private-sector agricultural and farming corporations. Numerous companies—including Bayer—also sponsor research chairs.

These initiatives have resulted in one of the world’s largest concentrations of expertise and facilities dedicated to crop research and development—a Silicon Valley of agriculture responsible for breakthrough after breakthrough: edible nanomaterials that extend the colour and flavour of food; bioplastics derived from ingredients such as beans, soy, and wheat straw; DNA barcoding that helps distinguish more than 400,000 species of land plants. Jay Bradshaw, president of SyngentaCanada, may well have been speaking for the entire industry when, in a 2014 report that was prepared to drum up investment in the university, he was quoted as saying: “There is a phenomenal network of agrifood hubs of activity—of formal networks and informal networks—to be able to tap into. That’s a huge benefit for us.”

Part of that benefit, for Syngenta and others, appears to involve access to a number of Guelph researchers who are capable of effectively challenging claims that herbicides and pesticides are a threat to people, wildlife, and the environment. Ritter, for one, has long argued that pesticides generally pose no threat if applied properly, because they are present in such small concentrations in food and drinking water. “What government regulators do with any potentially toxic substance is control the exposure in order to control the risk,” he tells me over the phone. “The algorithm is based on a definition of ‘reasonable probability of no risk, no harm,’ even if exposure takes place every day for the rest of your life.”

One of the most widely used of those “potentially toxic substances” is glyphosate. Since its invention in the 1970s by Monsanto, nearly 8.6 billion kilograms of it have been applied around the world. An active ingredient in the company’s blockbuster product, Roundup, it also appears in weed-killer lines from Dow and Syngenta. By 2014, the global market for it was $5.5 billion (US).

While both the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have declared the use of glyphosate to be safe, recent research has been setting off alarm bells. Two years before the IARC described the herbicide as a “probable carcinogen,” researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claimed that it could cause obesity, dementia, autism, and Parkinson’s, among other chronic diseases.

But the controversy surrounding glyphosate has also become—thanks in no small part to the interventions of University of Guelph scientists—a case study in how difficult it is to establish any fixed opinion on the safety of such compounds. In 2001, with funding from the US National Science Foundation, Rick Relyea, a community ecologist then at the University of Pittsburgh, began a series of experiments looking into the effects of pesticides on amphibians. The sensitivity of that animal class to environmental changes makes it a useful indicator of ecosystem health. When Relyea introduced glyphosate to tadpoles, the results were dramatic. “The day after applying the pesticides,” he later wrote, “we found very high tadpole mortality in the tanks treated with Roundup.” In 2005, he published his findings in the journal Ecological Applications.

Soon afterwards, the journal published a lengthy letter from a group of scientists, including University of Guelph researchers Dean G. Thompson, then an adjunct professor there, and Keith Solomon. Now seventy-two, Solomon has published hundreds of papers, joined numerous international toxicology organizations and committees, and supervised dozens of graduate students. Both Solomon and Thompson have also conducted research funded by Monsanto.

The letter challenged Relyea’s findings, claiming, among other things, that the tadpoles had been exposed to a chemical concentration greater than typical application rates, and that his experiment had not tested real-world scenarios: because glyphosate is not sprayed directly over water, they argued, it poses a limited threat to aquatic life.

In his response, published in the same issue, Relyea insisted that he had applied a manufacturer-recommended concentration of the chemical, and suggested that his critics’ letter had contradicted the research findings of one of its own authors: years earlier, Thompson had asserted that wetlands are inadvertently affected by the over-spraying of glyphosates. In a later article, Relyea highlighted Solomon and Thompson’s ties to Monsanto: “Accepting research money from a pesticide manufacturer is not a problem. Debating the safety of the company’s product without full disclosure that the company is funding your research is a problem. It can affect the world’s assessment of your independence and objectivity.”

“Funding bias,” which skews scientific studies toward the interests of their financial sponsors, is a well-documented phenomenon. But evidence also suggests that corporations have underwritten pesticide-friendly research as part of a larger strategy. “We call it ‘doubt-mongering,’” explains Harvard University science historian Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt (2010). “If you create doubt in people’s minds, you can delay action to regulate a product.”

Take the example of bisphenol A, used to make plastic bottles. According to a 2005 review of 115 studies that examined the effects of the industrial chemical on living organisms, 94 of the 104 that were publicly funded uncovered harmful results—none of the 11 funded by industry did. The chemical manufacturers, however, used their own studies to call into question any opposing findings.

Oreskes says this strategy was also used by Big Tobacco. In the 1950s, cigarettes were found to cause cancer—in response, the industry built a sophisticated public-relations apparatus to obfuscate the link. In 1979, for instance, R. J. Reynolds established a $45 million research program at top universities in the US, including Harvard, to study degenerative diseases and how things like stress affect health. The purpose of this research, according to internal tobacco documents, was to develop “data useful in defending the industry against attacks.” In short, it was intended to arm tobacco executives with information that would allow them to argue that there were other possible causes for premature deaths in smokers. “There’s a very famous tobacco-industry document where they say ‘doubt is our product,’” says Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “They funded research designed to confuse people about everything you could possibly think of related to tobacco.”

Since then, pharmaceutical, oil, and agrochemical companies have been accused of taking a page from this playbook. Industry groups create apparently neutral websites to promote the safety of their products, and serve up experts who share with the public positive messages about pesticides—both tactics used in response to Cumberland’s campaign. Most important, they fund scientists who produce supportive research.

According to Kathleen Cooper, a senior researcher with the Canadian Environmental Law Association, industry-funded scientists often subscribe to a paradigm of risk assessment that demands an extremely high standard of proof of harm before they will accept something as toxic. “It’s the reason we hardly ban stuff anymore. It’s the paradigm industry insisted upon, and they won that battle. Government agencies are now entrenched in it.”

According to this risk model, when chemicals enter the environment at recommended amounts, they are assumed to pose little or no risk to people or animals—until overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise. Studies that produce unfavourable results are often treated as outliers. “The people who’ve made a living off this paradigm believe in it,” says Cooper. “It’s a belief system as much as a scientific system.”

Cumberland understands how difficult it is to shake that belief system. Now teaching in Fredericton, he notes that glyphosate is still being sprayed in New Brunswick, and that one of the herbicide’s biggest users, J.?D. Irving, has reportedly jumped into a multi-year $1.5 million research project with the University of New Brunswick and the University of Maine to study the deer decline. “It’s about proving that glyphosate is safe,” says Cumberland, who believes that, whatever the finding, the industry is too invested in the chemical to give it up. “I have no idea what the next step is. We just have to continue to educate the public on the issue. If you spray this stuff, it has an impact. It has a cost. People have to ignore the science not to realize that.”

TYRONE HAYES is one of America’s most famous dissident scientists. A biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, he has been the subject of a lengthy profile in The New Yorker and a documentary film by Hollywood director Jonathan Demme,both of which explored the protracted campaign Syngenta mounted to discredit him after he questioned the environmental safety of their best-selling weed killer, atrazine. (The company’s strategy to “exploit Hayes’s faults/problems” was detailed in internal PR memos obtained by lawyers in 2004.)

Hayes’s struggle with Syngenta made headlines—less well known, however, is the role University of Guelph scientists played in countering his research.

Invented in 1958, atrazine is sprayed on crops such as maize, canola, and sugar cane. Effective against weeds that have grown resistant to glyphosate, it is the second-most widely used herbicide in the US, and the one most frequently detected in the country’s drinking water. (It was banned by the European Union in 2003 because of concerns about groundwater contamination.) About 34.5 million kilograms of the chemical are sprayed across the US every year, and more than 500,000 kilograms are sold annually in Canada.

Syngenta AG, a global Swiss agrochemical company, is the world’s largest manufacturer of atrazine. When the EPA ordered a large-scale review of the chemical in 1994, Syngenta (known then as Novartis AG) assembled a panel of scientists through a consulting firm called EcoRisk, and invited Hayes, a Harvard-educated scientist, to join. Hayes began studying atrazine’s effects on amphibians. He soon discovered that atrazine had a dramatic impact on the sexual organs of frogs: some of the specimens he dissected could no longer be clearly identified as male or female.

By 2000, Hayes had cut ties with Syngenta and begun publishing his own findings: frogs exposed to atrazine at levels thirty times below what the EPA permitted in water, it seemed, were being transformed into hermaphrodites. He concluded that atrazine was contributing to the decline of frog populations around the world. “Atrazine is an endocrine-disruptor,” he says. “And the concern is that it increases estrogen production. That means male frogs turn into females. In humans, it’s associated with things like breast cancer, prostate cancer, decreased sperm count, and infertility. It’s also associated with birth defects, including male genital malformations.”

Syngenta disputed Hayes’s results. According to Chris Davison, a company spokesperson, “No one has, will, or can ingest enough atrazine via drinking water to adversely affect their health.” He notes that the EPA reviewed the relevant laboratory and field studies of amphibians, and concluded that atrazine “does not adversely affect amphibian gonadal development”—a conclusion its Scientific Advisory Panel reaffirmed in 2011.

But last June, the agency appeared to reverse this decision. It released a 500-page draft report that stated that atrazine exceeded its “levels of concern” for chronic risk to birds, mammals, and fish. Syngenta declared the findings “scientifically unjustified” and complained that the report contained “numerous data and methodological errors.”

Hayes says the studies that have determined that atrazine is not harmful to frogs have one thing in common—they’re all funded by Syngenta. He doesn’t think it’s an accident that, as part of its campaign to undermine him, the company asked academics they considered friendly to test his findings. Among those academics were two University of Guelph scientists: biologist Glen Van Der Kraak and Keith Solomon.

Solomon, who was on Syngenta’s Eco-Risk panel, has for two decades claimed that atrazine isn’t harmful at the levels found in the environment. He has also accepted sums from Syngenta—nearly $110,000 between 2011 and 2014 alone—to conduct studies on its product. In 2013, he received $14,976 to examine atrazine’s effects on a species of green algae that exists in symbiosis with salamander embryos. Solomon concluded that the algae exhibited a tolerance to the herbicide greater than that of other species. “He never met a chemical he didn’t like,” quips Hayes.

Targeting Hayes, and other scientists who had produced similar results, Syngenta funded a massive study that examined more than 100 papers on the chemical. Released in 2008 and co-written by six researchers, among them Van Der Kraak and Solomon, it concluded “that environmentally relevant concentrations of atrazine do not affect amphibian growth, sexual development, reproduction, and survival.”

Studies have shown that the peer-review system is subjective, prone to bias, and unreliable when it comes to catching errors.

However, Jason Rohr, a biologist at the University of South Florida, examined the Syngenta-backed study and found it rife with errors. “They misrepresented over fifty papers from the scientific literature,” Rohr says. “There were 122 inaccurate or misleading statements in their review paper, and about 97 or 98 percent of them were biased in the direction of suggesting that atrazine was safer than it was.” Rohr assembled a detailed list of statements he considered false. The Solomon group suggested, for example, that one atrazine study had used charcoal filters in tanks to which the chemical was introduced: “Since charcoal will absorb atrazine, this may have affected exposure concentrations” and “seriously?.?.?. compromised the study,” it wrote. But Rohr pointed out that the original researchers had not placed filters in the tanks at all.

In his co-authored critique of the Syngenta-funded study, Rohr noted that Solomon and his co-authors “cast doubts on the validity of 94 percent of the sixty-three presented cases where atrazine had adverse effects, whereas they only weakly criticized 2.8 percent of the seventy cases where there were no effects of atrazine at environmentally relevant concentrations.” He added that his group “ found no evidence that the criticized studies were more poorly conceived or conducted than those that were not criticized.”

If this is true, how did such a study survive the peer-review process? While peer reviewing is regarded by the public as the gold standard for vetting science, a number of studies reveal that the system is subjective, prone to bias, and unreliable when it comes to catching errors. The process, says Rohr, “is altruistic—most reviewers trust that the primary authors are accurately reflecting the literature. Whether or not this means the process is broken is a matter of opinion. Nevertheless, it isn’t perfect.”

STUDIES PRODUCED at the University of Guelph on behalf of agrochemical companies have also had a profound impact on regulators—as seen in the case of neonicotinoids, or neonics.

Developed by Bayer in the 1980s, neonics are currently used in more than 120 countries and make up a global market of $3 billion (US). One of the world’s most popular class of insecticides, they are applied to almost all corn and to one-third of the soy grown in the US. Of the eighty pest-control products that Canada allows, thirty-six are neonics.

In recent years, bee populations have been declining significantly across North America—in California alone, honey production has fallen by half—and there is reason to believe that, in some regions, neonics are playing a part. In 2014, more than half of the bees in Ontario didn’t survive the winter, while other provinces lost on average about 25 percent (an acceptable level of winter loss for Canadian beekeepers is about 15 percent). “We first noticed something wrong in 2010, something that was chronically poisoning the bees,” says Tibor Szabo, president of the Ontario Beekeepers’ Association. “But then in 2011, there was a lot more, and again in 2012, right at the start of the year, hives were just dropping dead in a twenty-four-hour period.”

Davis Bryans is one of the owners of Munro Honey, which has bred bees in Alvinston, Ontario, for more than a century. “We had a big loss in 2012 after the farmers planted early,” he recalls. “Bees were healthy in the mornings, and they came back and were dying at the entrance of the hives.” When those bees were tested, they were found to have traces of neonics. Munro Honey is now a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit, launched in 2014 on behalf of Ontario and Quebec beekeepers, that is seeking $450 million in damages from Bayer and Syngenta over the use of neonics. In 2015, the Ontario government introduced regulations that will reduce neonic use in the province by 80 percent.

Why did Canadian and US regulators approve neonics despite the fact that many beekeepers believe they are toxic to bees? One influential study, launched at the University of Guelph in 2005 and funded by Bayer, found that bees exposed to canola grown from neonic-treated seeds showed no long-term effects. The research was conducted by environmental biologist Cynthia Scott-Dupree, currently the Bayer CropScience Chair in sustainable pest management. She has completed at least three Bayer-funded studies on bees and neonics, one of which was co-authored by David Drexler, a former director of development and licensing at Bayer. Both the EPA and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA)—which regulates pesticides in Canada—relied on her findings to justify expanding neonics registration in both countries.

But as bee populations around the world declined, the Scott-Dupree study was “downgraded from a core study to a supplemental study by EPA scientists because it was not a strong valid study,” says Jim Frazier, a professor emeritus of entomology at Pennsylvania State University.

When scientists at the EPA examined Scott-Dupree’s research more closely, they found irregularities in how it had been conducted. The agency said that control and test hives had been placed too close together, resulting in contamination of the controls. Frazier says the bees had access to plants that were not treated with neonics. “And so, of course, the colonies are not going to show degradation inside that neonic-treated field, because that’s only a fraction of the food they’re consuming,” he explains. “So it’s really not a valid study for assessing the impact of neonicotinoids on treated pollen, because it’s been diluted by other pollen coming in from greater distances.”

In 2012, after downgrading Scott-Dupree’s original study, the EPA and PMRA asked Bayer to conduct it again. With $950,000 from the company, Scott-Dupree repeated her work, this time following more rigorous standards. In 2014, she arrived at the same results: there was no connection between neonics and bee fatalities. Critics pounced on this study, too, claiming that the colonies she gathered—both the control group and non-control—were taken from areas where bees might have been exposed to neonics. All hives may therefore have had insecticide in their pollen before the study began. “If they wanted a proper control,” one Canadian bee inspector told me, “they should have used colonies that could not have had contaminated food sources.”

When I contacted Bayer, the company referred me to Croplife Canada, the main lobby group for the country’s agrochemical industry. Pierre Petelle, Croplife’s vice-president of chemistry, argues that the colony numbers gathered by Statistics Canada suggest the fears may be exaggerated. “When you look at the Canadian situation, with the use of neonics that we have here, we’re just not seeing that storyline of bee decline and massive bee loss. The decline seems much more related to the severity of winter. I mean, if you track how cold and long the winter was, there you start to see a correlation of highs and lows in terms of losses—much more than the neonic use.”

Studies not financed by agrochemical companies, however, continue to raise concerns about neonics and bees. In 2015, a group of scientists in Switzerland, along with Dave Shutler, a biologist at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, published a peer-reviewed study in Scientific Reports that explored how queen bees—crucial to the health of a colony or hive—are affected by neonics. The team compared a control group of clean queen bees to queens that were exposed to “field-realistic” amounts of the pesticide. The results showed that neonics can affect the development of queen bees’ reproductive systems and lead them to store fewer sperm—which in turn can lead to fewer new worker bees. Any honeybee colony that falls below a certain critical mass of workers faces tougher odds of survival. “As a broad statement,” Shutler told me, “there’s no question that neonics in significant concentrations are toxic to honeybees.”

THE AGRIFOOD industrial complex emphasizes a message: that herbicides and pesticides are a boon to forestry companies and farmers, offering them safe ways to suppress pests and weeds. Scientists who accept the need for such chemicals may not see anything wrong with taking funds from companies to evaluate their effects. “I don’t want to give the impression,” says Rohr, “that all people supported by the industry are necessarily being unethical or disingenuous in their scientific work. I think people can remain objective.”

But Cooper isn’t so sure. When she reviews scientific literature on a particular chemical for government consultations, she’s skeptical of studies that disclose industry funding. “You’re immediately concerned that it could be biased, so you tend to steer clear of them—especially if you have a situation where you see a pattern, where the industry-funded studies find no effect and the more independent work does show an effect. I mean, that’s a big red flag.”

When asked whether cash from the agrochemical sector was influencing the outcome of research conducted by its scientists, Malcolm Campbell, the vice-president of research at the University of Guelph, responded that “properly conducted research is agnostic to the funding source. As well, our university has established guidelines regarding research integrity and conflict of interest to which all faculty must adhere.”

For his part, Ritter disputes the notion that he is pro-industry. “I know there are people who’ve been critical of my position,” he says. “But I don’t take a position which is industry friendly. I take a position which is influenced by the data.”

Solomon is likewise unapologetic about taking industry money. “Are the works of Beethoven and Mozart any less good because they were paid for?” he asked in 2014 during an interview on Global TV. “We deliver a good product, and we go with the science, we go with the data. We live and die by the data.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the PMRA as the “Pesticide Management Review Agency.” It is, in fact, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency. The Walrus regrets the error.

This originally appeared in the May 2017 edition under the headline “Science for Sale.”

https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/article/Water-safety-arguments-on-tap-12685482.php

Water-safety arguments on tap

Published 12:00 am CDT, Saturday, October 29, 2011

EDWARDSVILLE - A toxicologist who could play a key role in lawsuits involving the alleged physical risks of the chemical atrazine in drinking water says years of testing has shown the product to pose no health concern.

But a plaintiff's lawyer representing the Holiday Shores Sanitary District and at least 29 other water suppliers says there is new science - and growing proof - that the product should be considered harmful at any level.

"I'm happy to try this molecule (in court) any day of the week," said attorney Stephen Tillery, the senior member of St. Louis-based Korein Tillery LLC.

The class-actionarguments are unfolding, both in federal court and in Madison County Circuit Court, where the case has lingered since 2004.

A number of motions will come up in a hearing set for Wednesday in Edwardsville. Much of the dispute now focuses on 4 million pages representing thousands of documents that the chief defendant - Switzerland- and North Carolina-based Syngenta - wants to keep as confidential. Tillery's firm is asking Circuit Judge William Mudge to include many of those documents as evidence against the company.

Syngenta maintains the documents are proprietary, trade secrets, attorney-client protected or one of the other recognized legal privileges.

Atrazine is a chemical molecule placed in herbicides to help in weed control, primarily for corn, sorghum and sugar cane crop. It can be found in some 50 products used by agriculture. Because it does not bind to soil it has great propensity for run-off into nearby water systems.

In his "prayer for relief" in Madison County, Tillery is seeking to recover any past and future costs of cleaning up the Holiday Shores water supply. Seven other plaintiffs who have joined the circuit-court case are seeking similar redress.

The case is one of two brought by Tillery against atrazine maker Syngenta. The second is a federal lawsuit pending in the Benton courtroom of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. The second case, although filed subsequent to the one in Madison County, is actually further along, with a decision on trial dates expected by December 2012.

The county case has plodded along for seven years, with one year spent by the defendant in a failed attempt to get the suit shifted to federal court. Former Madison County Circuit Judge Daniel Stack then took three years to determine that the case would not be dismissed.

After Stack retired and some subsequent shuffling between judges, the case ended up in Mudge's courtroom last year. Arguments about the evidence - and whether Syngenta purposely is hiding some of it - erupted during a long hearing in February.

The local lawsuit began with Holiday Shores but quickly added other suppliers of public water.The suit asks for damages to recover the costs of taking the chemical out of the water supply. The process of removing atrazine is expensive, requiring carbon filtering and costly equipment, Tillery said. Holiday Shores has spent a couple of million dollars replacing its systems twice in the last several years to address the issue.

"Who ends up paying it? The consumer," Tillery said.

Between the state and federal cases, there are some 30 plaintiffs representing 40 communities that serve water to almost 2 million people in the Midwest. The city of Gillespie, which produces water for Macoupin County communities, is among plaintiffs.

The water providers claim atrazine can cause myriad medical problems, including a low sperm count. However, the herbicide's makers claim just the opposite, saying the product degrades over time and can be removed from water easily.

Tim Pastoor, Syngenta's principal scientist, expects to be an expert witness for the company although he has not yet been deposed, he said. He has a doctorate from the University of Michigan and has been working at Syngenta and a predecessor company for the past 24 years, focusing on atrazine issues, which he describes as "an ongoing scientific odyssey."

The product has been around for 50 years, is especially popular with farmers and is strongly supported by their lobby, which has encouraged Syngenta to defend itself in the court cases. Pastoor called atrazine "the aspirin of agriculture."

Atrazine is used in 60 percent of all acres of corn planted, meaning wide use in the Midwest, he said.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has thoroughly evaluated the product and determined that no single person has enough exposure to atrazine to cause ill effects, including Syngenta's own workers, who have been subjected to thorough "medical surveillance," Pastoor said.

Atrazine is an organic compound made up of nitrogren, carbon and chlorine.

Pastoor said a 150-pound adult could drink thousands of gallons of water containing 3 parts per billion of atrazine every day for 70 years and still see no adverse health effect from atrazine. The 3 ppb (the maximum contaminant level) is a federal drinking-water standard based on a four-quarter rolling annual average.

The National Institutes of Health has been performing an ongoing Agricultural Health Study since 1994, looking at farmers and growers who use the product. Some 89,000 have been enrolled in the study.

"There is no consistent evidence of an association between atrazine and any cancer site (cell group)," Pastoor said, citing the EPA's findings.

The EPA has convened scientific advisory panels to look into atrazine 11 times since 2000 and found no reason not to reregister atrazine use, he said. Most products are only subjected to a single such review, Pastoor said.

EPA also looked into the potential for prostate cancer risks from atrazine and found none, he said.

"Atrazine is one of the best-studied molecules on the planet," he said.

The product was last reregistered in 2006 and is due again in 2013, he said.

Tillery claims the EPA has approved atrazine's use in part because it's not thoroughly studied atrazine's metabolytes, which he maintains are far more hazardous. Metabolytes are chemicals spun off from atrazine when it is exposed to such things as temperature and water.

However, Pastoorcounters that metabolytes have been considered, both in standards set by the EPA and the World Health Organization.

Despite the WHO endorsement, the European Union has banned the use of atrazine in those countries.

The long delay in the Madison County case has given Tillery's camp the chance to reference studies that came out only in the last couple of years. He produced several of those for a reporter. One, conducted through Purdue University, studied 19 drinking water systems in Indiana and concluded that atrazine and perhaps other co-occurring herbicides were associated with increased prevalence of low-birth-weight babies - though not necessarily an increase of preterm delivery of those babies.

Syngenta's scientist, however, said medical studies have to be taken as a whole. He maintained there is no evidence that atrazine causes birth defects, reproductive problems or cancers.

[winchester got subpoena?]

yikes818

https://www.ecowatch.com/generational-harm-of-pesticides-2596453994.html

Environmentally-Caused Disease Crisis? Pesticide Damage to DNA Found 'Programmed' Into Future Generations

When Dr. Paul Winchester, a pediatrician, moved to Indiana fromColoradoin 2002, he noticed something disturbing—a high number of birth defects.

"I was used to the number of birth defects I should see in a community hospital, and I saw many more in Indiana," said Winchester, who is medical director of the Neonatal and Intensive Care Unit at St. Francis Hospital in Indianapolis.

Winchester decided to investigate the reason for the higher numbers of birth defects. His research zeroed in on the herbicide atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. and the most commonly detected pesticide in U.S. drinking water.

Winchester and several other researchers including Michael Skinner, professor of biology at Washington State University's Center for Reproductive Biology, conducted a study to see if there was a link between atrazine in drinking water and birth defects.

Studies have found that atrazine is an endocrine disruptor, a substance that can alter the human hormonal system. Atrazine was banned by the European Union because of its persistent groundwater contamination.

In their study, Winchester and his team found that concentrations of atrazine in drinking water were highest in May and June when farmers sprayed their fields with the herbicide. They also found that birth defects peaked during the same months indicating a close correlation.

"We plotted water concentrations and birth defects, and they fit like a hat," Winchester said.

Their study, which was funded by the Gerber Foundation, was published in 2017 on PLOS One.

Epigenetic Changes Programmed Into Future Generations

But the most disturbing finding was that atrazine had epigenetic effects. Epigenetics is the theory that environmental factors, such as diet, lifestyle choices and pesticides can impact the health of people who are exposed to them and also their descendants. Human DNA, according to epigenetics, is not unchangeable; it can be altered by such environmental factors. Epigenetic changes can be imprinted on the DNA of a fetus during pregnancy according to Winchester.

"If it is fixed then, it becomes inheritable and it becomes a trait that you can pass on to the next generation and the next and next."

Epigenetics is a fairly new concept that is slowly gaining acceptance.

"This is a really important concept that is difficult to teach the public, and when I say the public I include my clinical colleagues," Winchester said.

For the atrazine study, Winchester's team used Skinner's advanced technology to detect epigenetic changes—and resulting negative health impacts—over several generations of rats whose mothers were exposed to atrazine.

Common sense would seem to dictate that fewer negative health outcomes would be seen with subsequent generations. But the study found the opposite: There were more abnormalities and diseases in later generations of rats.The first generation of rats whose mother was exposed to atrazine weighed less than a group of control rats. The second generation weighed less but also had incidences of testicular disease and breast cancer. The third generation suffered the most problems, according to Winchester.

"We waited until the third generation, where no direct exposure (to atrazine) occurred, to ask if these epigenetic effects could be inherited, because there is no mechanism, no exposure, no toxicity that could explain a change in disease rates in the third generation. We found that 50 percent of offspring had multiple diseases, emotional and physical problems, hyperactivity, abnormal sperm, and premature puberty."

In an earlier study, Skinner found that the fungicide vinclozolin also caused inheritable diseases in rats. In all, he tested nearly 20 chemicals and found that all produce epigenetic effects, said Winchester.

"The most alarming (finding) to me is that almost every chemical tested including atrazine reduced fertility in the third generation of offspring."

Winchester called the discovery of the link between chemicals like pesticides and epigenetic changes leading to disease "the most important next discovery in all of medicine."

"What we are learning is that virtually every adult disease we have is going to be linked to epigenetic origins as well," he said.

More research needs to be done on the link between epigenetic effects and disease but Winchester says limited funding is available for such research.

"This is a huge thing that is going to change how we understand the origin of disease. But a big part of that is that it will change our interpretation of what chemicals are safe. In medicine I can't give a drug to somebody unless it has gone through a huge amount of testing. But all these chemicals haven't gone through anything like that. We've been experimented on for the last 70 years, and there's not one study on multigenerational effects."

Glyphosate Levels in Mothers Linked to Shorter Pregnancies

Winchester also co-authored a study published recently in Environmental Health that found detectable levels of glyphosate in the urine of 93 percent of a group of pregnant women in Central Indiana. The levels of glyphosate detected correlated with shorter pregnancies.

Again, the study raises concerns of possible epigenetic effects leading to disease in later generations.

"We are the first researchers in the U.S. to report that virtually every pregnant mother has glyphosate in her body at the time that she is creating fetal (epigenetic) imprints in her baby," Winchester said.

Winchester and his team focused on atrazine and glyphosate because they are the most heavily used pesticides in the U.S.

"That's the only reason they were chosen. We looked to see how commonly they are found in pregnant women, and we were mortified."

Winchester has been surprised by the lack of reaction to the glyphosate study.

"A chemical (glyphosate) that didn't come onto the scene until the 1970s has now managed to find its way into every single pregnant woman in the U.S, except seven percent of them. We thought that should be news. But in the current paradigm, which is definitely pro-business, the only thing companies have to prove is that it doesn't kill you if you drink it or take a big dose of it."

He sees a potentially catastrophic outcome resulting from the epigenetic damage caused by pesticides.

"Every one of the chemicals tested so far produces infertility, and the industrial world has reached the lowest level of fertility on record. We are below replacement levels in most industrialized countries including the U.S.This is looking at your own species extinction."

Winchester lays the blame at the feet of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which doesn't consider epigenetic or generational effects of chemicals, and the pesticide and chemical manufacturers like Monsanto.

"They can sell all the Roundup they want, but if it's in me they are going to have to pay for that. Every molecule that I find is on them … What I want to know is: has my fetus had altered DNA imprinting because of this chemical? I have a right to know that. If we are going to have to wait 75 years to find out if my grandchildren are going to be affected by it, I think somebody has to pay. They better put a fund together. I want somebody's head to roll. I don't think that the EPA and Monsanto get to walk away."

Winchester connects an ancient expression to a modern health crisis.

"Even in the Bible, there is the saying, 'the sins of the father are visited upon his offspring.' Well, it turns out that they are."

:{http://www:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{.alternet.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{org/environment/epa-verge-banning-dangerous-herbicide-if-it-can-stand-lobbyists:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

With a few months to go until the end of the Environmental Protection Agency’s public comment period on its risk assessment of the herbicide atrazine (the deadline was recently extended from August 5 to October 4), a battle is raging between environmentalists and farmers. Environmentalists, on the side of EPA, are pointing to evidence that atrazine affects human and animal health, particularly frog reproduction.

Farmers are siding with the agrochemical industry, questioning the science behind the assessment and asserting the herbicide is completely safe.

Seemingly contradictory scientific evidence and claims of significant economic impact are causing confusion. This has resulted in an unclear picture of a vital issue—one that could impact future generations, as well as plants and animals on land and in the water.

This leaves consumers in a difficult position. Who’s right? Are we safe? And is there something we should be doing?

Feminizing frogs

The second most widely used weedkiller in the U.S. after glyphosate (the main ingredient in Monsanto’s popular RoundUp herbicide), atrazine kills weeds that affect crops like maize and sugarcane by disrupting photosynthesis so they can’t make energy from sunlight. But it also affects hormones, making it a potential threat to humans and wildlife.

Atrazine tends to linger in the top six inches of soil, which helps to prevent the growth of new weeds. But this also makes it prone to being washed into groundwater; with around 70 million pounds of the chemical being released into the environment every year,the impact could be significant. Much of it becomes part of the water cycle: In the U.S., over half a million pounds of atrazine are precipitated in rainfall every year.

Amphibians appear to be hardest hit. A number of studies conducted in the early 2000s revealed that when exposed to very low levels of atrazine (0.0001 milligrams per liter (mg/L), far below the EPA’s safe limit of 0.003 mg/L), frogs grow to have several testes and ovaries. Some males even grew eggs in their testes, and some became females; they mated with other males and had the capacity to lay eggs, even though they were genetic males.

One study, published in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesshowed exposure to low levels of atrazine caused African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) to develop as hermaphrodites and led to a ten-fold decrease in testosterone. Another study published in the journal **Nature** revealed 10-92 percent of male wild leopard frogs (Rana pipiens) had gonadal abnormalities following exposure to the herbicide.

The biologist behind these studies is Tyrone Hayes, a biology professor at UC Berkeley. After publishing his findings, Hayes campaigned to ban atrazine, taking part in a documentary and a TED talk on the topic. The effects, he believes, are much more serious than altering frogs’ development.

He explains that atrazine switches on an enzyme called aromatase, which converts testosterone into estrogen, causing the chemical castration in male frogs. This action also impacts the development of breast cancer in humans, he says, which is controlled by estrogen.

As the evidence for the negative impacts of atrazine on the environment, wildlife and human health have built up over the years, there has been bubbling concern in the U.S., leading to a growing movement of environmentalists calling for a ban on the herbicide.

Building a body of evidence

To be used in the U.S., a pesticide (including herbicides, fungicides and other substances used for pest control) has to have the support of 120 scientific studies saying it’s safe. According to the manufacturer Syngenta, despite these damning results there are 7,000 studies showing the safety of atrazine. Syngenta’s website quotes several studies that say the herbicide doesn’t harm human or animal health, but the most recent is from 2008.

Four major scientific reviews of the effects of atrazine on amphibians and fish were carried out before 2008—and all were funded by Syngenta.

In 2010, researchers from the University of South Florida carried out a more comprehensive meta-analysis published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Their study showed consistent health impacts of atrazine on amphibians and fish, namely that the pesticide disrupts reproduction, metamorphosis and immune function.

Why the discrepancy? It’s down to the method, according to the researchers. Previous reviews, they say, “did not clearly define their inclusion criteria, did not make it clear which studies affected their conclusions (or how they came to their conclusions), and regularly dismissed significant effects of atrazine.”

The new EPA report is a risk assessment “based on the results from hundreds of toxicity studies on the effects of atrazine on plants and animals, over 20 years of surface water monitoring data, and higher tier aquatic exposure models.”

But critics from the agriculture industry are already calling the science behind the assessment into question.

Dale Moore, executive director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation, an industry lobbying group, commented on the assessment: “There appears to be no scientific basis to withhold re-registration of the product.” And Gary Marshall, executive director of the Missouri Corn Growers Associationsaid: “EPA’s flawed atrazine report is stomping science into the dirt and setting farmers up for significant economic hardship.”

One issue, again, could be the methodology used. A relatively new approach to risk assessment called systematic review, where a standardized method is used to analyze a large amount of data, could have helped the EPA defend its position, explained chemical risk assessment expert Paul Whaley, an independent scientific consultant and researcher at Lancaster University:

It’s a very polarized environment; the EPA will be criticized whatever they do. Part of the fallback is always to use the best possible methods for evaluating the evidence. One reason systematic review is good is that it allows you to demonstrate a greater degree of objectivity. I would certainly encourage the EPA to introduce systematic review methods into these sorts of assessments as a means to helping with credibility, addressing concerns about the methods they used and reducing some subjectivity.

Angering agriculture

The EPA is being criticized already. One common ag industry counterargument to the environmentalists and scientists concerned about the chemical’s impact on wildlife is that atrazine is actually good for the environment.

Pam Johnson, president of the National Corn Growers Association, points to the environmental benefits of atrazine:

Corn farmers rely on atrazine for no-till conservation agriculture on more than 44 million corn acres—a practice that is preventing soil erosion, protecting waterways and sequestering significant amounts of carbon dioxide across America. Specifically, the use of atrazine is an alternative to mechanical cultivation to control weeds, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions from plowing.

Industry groups like this can be persuasive: the NCGA represents 40,000 corn growers and the interests of more than 300,000 farmers impacted by corn growing. When such powers are involved in decisions about chemical use, there is a risk that the science will be overshadowed by political and economic considerations.

Indeed, many of the responses to the consultation so far cite cost as an important reason for the reregistration of atrazine. Don Coursey, an economist at the University of Chicago, estimated in 2010 that a ban on atrazine could “erase” between 21,000 and 48,000 jobs. “If all of that job loss were concentrated in the agricultural sector, its unemployment would grow by as much as 2.6 percent. Replacement costs for corn farmers could reach as high as $58 per acre,” he said.

TheNational Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit, disagrees: In a 2009 report exposing the EPA’s lack of action on atrazine contaminated water, the organization wrote that according to data, atrazine provides only minimal economic benefits:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates a ban on atrazine would result in crop losses of only 1.19 percent and decrease corn acreage in production by just 2.35 percent. Italy and Germany (both of which banned atrazine nearly 20 years ago) have not seen any drop in corn productivity or total acreage of land in production for corn since their ban on atrazine was put in place.=

Taking a more long-term view, a ban on atrazine could actually be economically beneficial by closing the price gap between conventionally and organically grown foods, according to Kerry Kriger, founder, executive director and ecologist at Save the Frogs!, an amphibian conservation group. This, she says, would benefit “the organic farmers who provide a valuable service to Americans by delivering us food that is safe to eat.”

Making science inform policy

Regardless of the potential financial impacts of a ban, continued use of atrazine would have far more costly environmental and health impacts that would be impossible to estimate in the long term.

“We’ve reached a point with atrazine where more scientific analysis is just unnecessary—atrazine needs to be banned now,” commented Nathan Donley of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit working to save threatened and endangered species. “When the government's own scientists say there's enough atrazine in streams and rivers right now to kill frogs and other imperiled wildlife, we should be worried. How many animals have to die before we do what Europe did 12 years ago and ban atrazine?”

Atrazine was banned in the European Union in 2004 after unacceptable levels of the herbicide were found in groundwater, and manufacturer Syngenta was unable to prove that the levels were safe or that the leakage could be prevented. Around the same time, the EPA conducted an assessment of its safety and concluded that atrazine is unlikely to cause cancer in humans. Several assessments since then have reached the same conclusion, resulting in the herbicide being reregistered repeatedly.

The EPA started the current risk assessment in 2013 after detecting levels that breach its own limit of 0.003 mg/L or 3000 ng/L, in some cases by almost 200 times. Three years on there are 520 pages of evidence showing that atrazine and the compounds it degrades into in the environment have significant impacts on humans, birds, animals, fish, amphibians and invertebrates.

And there’s more evidence to come. A year ago, the EPA reached a settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity that requires them to analyze the impacts of atrazine and another widely used pesticide, glyphosate, on 1500 endangered plants and animals in the U.S.

The EPA’s risk assessment is likely to lead to significant restrictions or a ban on the use of atrazine. Because of the strong opposition and the sheer volume of it being used in the U.S. today, the authorities will need to work closely with farmers and other users to phase it out, as Paul Whaley explained:

Atrazine is a blockbuster compound. If you have an established blockbuster compound, then you realize you have a fairly serious problem with it, removing that from the market becomes rather tricky because it can be very disruptive. One has to be aware of the consequences of banning a compound like atrazine and suddenly removing it from the market, but at the same time if it poses unacceptable environmental risks we have to think about how we’re going to get rid of it. I don’t think it’s acceptable to continue with the status quo in this case.

Although it is likely to be a disruptive move, the NRDC believes there are plenty of other options for farmers: “Integrated pest management techniques could help farmers eliminate the use of atrazine and control weeds while reducing their use of other dangerous chemicals.”

Ultimately, taking atrazine off the market might have a detrimental economic impact on farmers. But the opposite is also possible: a ban could force them to explore new techniques without the use of harmful chemicals, making organic farming more widespread and less costly for the producer and consumer. We could look back on this consultation as the turning point that put organic food in more American homes.

Kriger of Save the Frogs! said it best when she commented to the EPA: “In the interest of public and environmental health and to create a healthy planet, I urge you to take advantage of your privileged role in government and do what is best for the environment and the people of the United States of America: Place an immediate federal ban on the use and production of atrazine."

The atrazine risk assessment is open for public comment until October 4.

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/feds-finally-address-the-risks-of-widely-used-ag-chemical-atrazine/

500-some-page draft assessment on an agricultural chemical from a federal agency is generally not the stuff of intrigue and redemption. But just such a document could upend the American corn industry, generate strict new regulations for achemical company in the midst of being acquired by a Chinese firm for $43 billion, and clear the name of a researcher who nearly had his reputation destroyed.

The document published Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency reads, “This risk assessment concludes that aquatic plant communities are impacted in many areas where atrazine use is heaviest, and there is potential chronic risk to fish, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates in these same locations.”

It may be a jumble to you, but for Tyrone B. Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, that conclusion reads as vindication.

“The phrase ‘It’s about time’ comes to mind,” he told TakePart Friday when asked about his response to the report. For nearly two decades, Hayes has faced personal and professional attacks for saying much the same in published research and outspoken lectures and interviews.

Hayes began studying atrazine in 1999 by testing the widely used herbicide on amphibians—initially with funding from Syngenta, the Swiss chemical company that manufactures the weed killer and at the time a subsidiary of the corporation Novartis. He found that atrazine could cause sexual abnormalities in frogs, including frogs that developed both testes and ovaries—hermaphrodites—or that had multiple sexual organs that were deformed. Hayes and others are also concerned that atrazine, which is commonly found in the water supply in farming regions, could cause similar problems in humans. In 2012, Syngenta settled a long-running class-action lawsuit over contaminated drinking water in the Midwest. The company paid $105 million to reimburse water utilities for the costs of filtering out atrazine; 2,000 utilities were eligible for the funds.

Syngenta questioned the methodology of that initial study, for which Hayes’ lab received $125,000, and his relationship with the company deteriorated—but Hayes has continued his research on atrazine, which is the second-most-common herbicide in the United States. Now the EPA is citing the work of Hayes and others in the new assessment, which notes that atrazine can affect the sexual development of amphibians in a number of ways, including producing “gonadal malformations” like those Hayes documented. It’s unclear what will come of the assessment, but the agriculture industry is raising concerns that it will lead to a ban.

In response to the draft assessment, Timothy Pastoor, a toxicologist and former principal scientist at Syngenta, wrote in an email that the company “continues to support and defend the use of this important herbicide. Atrazine has been the backbone of corn weed control in the U.S. for more than 50 years. Extensive scientific research and numerous regulatory reviews have continuously proven the benefits and safety of this active ingredient.”

Nearly all of the 72 million pounds of atrazine applied to farmland annually are used to control weeds in cornfields. The No. 1 herbicide used in the U.S. is glyphosate, which has been in both the popular and the regulatory spotlight since the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer said last March that it was probably carcinogenic to humans.

Hayes told me, “I’ve known all along” that atrazine posed a risk to wildlife. He said that Syngenta knew too. “I worked with these guys, I sat in a room with these guys, and they acknowledged that atrazine is bad,” he said. “My science, my students—the work that we did was so solid that they had to go after me with personal attacks.”

Those attacks, which ranged from buying online ads calling Hayes’ credibility into question and targeting them to web searches about him to encouraging Berkeley to take disciplinary action against him, were the subject of a 2014 story in The New Yorker by Rachel Aviv. She wrote about the company’s plans to undermine Hayes as revealed in internal documents made public through the 2012 lawsuits.

In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

Syngenta, which Hayes characterized to TakePart as being run by “evil people,” got to him. As Aviv wrote, he became wary of talking with people about his research in the early 2000s and was concerned that his calls were being listened to. Colleagues began to think that he had lost his objectivity—a notion that the long, ranting emails he sent to numerous recipients at Syngenta support.

In one 2008 email, published on the website atrazine.com by Syngenta, Hayes wrote, “I know for a fact you have all been warned about communicating anything to me…rumors that I record phone and personal conversations, that I have access to emails and conference calls…rumors that I have contacts inside the company…even rumors that I have planted listening devices on some of you at meetings that have made it back to your office and homes…Not to worry, many crazy people are paranoid…I always say, the secret to a happy successful life of paranoia, is to keep careful track of your persecutors.” The emails drift wildly and might include references to his research, Syngenta’s products, Hayes’ dreams, pop culture, a heavy does of rap lyrics—in which he uses asterisks to censor even mildly offensive words—some of which depict sexual imagery. In one email, he rewrites the lyrics to LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells”: “tyrone b hayes is hard as h*ll!”

Objective or not, Hayes’ work was reviewed alongside hundreds of other toxicological studies in the EPA assessment to reach the conclusion that atrazine use “poses chronic risks or potential for chronic risks” to wildlife, as Emily Marquez, an endocrinologist and staff scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, a group that advocates for stronger pesticide controls and chemical alternatives, said in a statement. Before the EPA assessment was released, “I didn’t understand how we could keep on using atrazine” when research had shown it can cause sexual development problems in not only amphibians but reptiles, birds, and mammals, she told me in an interview.

Marquez said it’s likely the body of work from Hayes and other researchers on atrazine’s effects “is going to be vindicated” with this assessment.

Chip Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association, an industry trade group, told the website Hoosier Ag Today that the EPA is determined to ban the herbicide. “In the coming weeks, we will be urging farmers and others who care about our rural economy to contact the EPA and to tell them to base their decision on sound science,” he said.

The push to discredit the EPA’s findings is afoot: The draft assessment, according to Syngenta’s Pastoor, “contains a number of unjustifiable determinations based on unsound science that, if uncorrected, could have a significant impact” on the agency’s decision whether or not to continue to allow the herbicide’s use. In finalizing the assessment, Pastoor said the agency “should give proper consideration and weighting to studies that are crucial to a scientifically justified conclusion.” He said the current version, for example, “grossly over-predicts water concentrations and therefore overestimates risks.”

Hayes, who said the assessment is a big, important step, isn’t expecting swift action from the government even if the final version of the assessment resembles the draft version.

“I’ll have a party” if the assessment leads to a ban or strict controls, he said. Hayes, who is known for monochromatic clothing, said, “I’ll stop wearing all black” if the EPA bans the chemicals. “I’ll change my wardrobe.”

But even if he doesn’t think the EPA will take such an action, Hayes is convinced that a ban is necessary. “Let me say unequivocally, without a doubt, we shouldn’t be using atrazine,” he said.

coursey, avery

omg cute cartoon frog on calculator?

hit hayes http://agsense.org/activist-scientists/

news:

EPA REJECTS SCIENCE IN LATEST ATRAZINE REPORT

Posted: 06-02-16read more

Politics, Activist Agendas Trump Science in EPA Report that Would Effectively Ban Atrazine

Posted: 05-11-16read more

Baylor Studies Show Atrazine Has No Long-Term Effects on Aquatic Plant Life

Posted: 09-09-15

same quotes

http://agsense.org/articles/epa-rejects-science-latest-atrazine-report/

wow network still kicking

"certain" ... comment period started Monday and runs through Aug. 5.

National Sorghum Producers has criticized the methodology EPA used in the assessment.

“We feel the agency has abandoned a science-based approach, even including studies in the review that the agency’s own 2012 Scientific Advisory Panel said were flawed,” past chairman J.B. Stewart, a sorghum farmer from Keyes, Oklahoma, said in a news release. “The EPA has ignored years of analyses that show atrazine is safe. It’s one of the most studied chemicals in the U.S. and has been a proven and dependable herbicide for more than 50 years.”

Atrazine is in a class of herbicides called triazine.

The Triazine Network, a nationwide coalition of farm organizations, similarly opposes the EPA finding. Gary Marshall, chairman of the Triazine Network and executive director of the Missouri Corn Growers Association,issued a statement claiming the report relied on flawed studies and fails to acknowledge atrazine’s necessity to farmers:

“EPA’s flawed atrazine report is stomping science into the dirt and setting farmers up for significant economic hardship. We challenge this latest proposal and insist EPA abide by federal law that requires the agency to make determinations based on credible scientific evidence. Again and again, we must ask EPA to follow the law. A regulatory agency should not need to be reminded of that detail.”

Certain environmental advocacy groups, on the other hand, want to see the herbicide banned. The Center for Biological Diversity, for instance, points out the European Union took it off the market in 2004, and hopes the U.S. follows.

“Anyone who cares about wildlife, people and the environment should be deeply troubled by this finding,” said Nathan Donley, a scientist with the center’s environmental health program. “When the government’s own scientists say there’s enough atrazine in streams and rivers right now to kill frogs and other imperiled wildlife, we should be worried. How many animals have to die before we do what Europe did 12 years ago and ban atrazine?”

EPA has been reviewing atrazine as part of a routine re-registration process.

The agency is also reviewing atrazine and other triazines’ impact on human health. It anticipates releasing that assessment later this year.

josephine.musico@lubbockonline.com | 766-8796

http://www.alternet.org/environment/deadly-pesticide-atrazine-harming-most-animal-and-plant-species-says-epa-new-report

70 mil lb US/ yr

amount of the herbicide atrazine that’s released into the environment in the United States is likely harming most species of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, according to a risk assessment released Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency. Atrazine is also well known as a hormone disruptor that has been linked to birth defects and cancer in humans, and contamination of ground-, surface- and drinking-water supplies. About 70 million pounds of atrazine are used in the United States each year.

Anyone who cares about wildlife, people and the environment should be deeply troubled by this finding," said Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “When the government's own scientists say there's enough atrazine in streams and rivers right now to kill frogs and other imperiled wildlife, we should be worried. How many animals have to die before we do what Europe did 12 years ago and ban atrazine?”

The second-most widely used pesticide in the United States and already banned in Europe, atrazine was found to cause reproductive harm to mammals and birds in real-world scenarios, with EPA “levels of concern” surpassed nearly 200-fold, according to the new EPA assessment. Atrazine is present in water levels much higher than are needed to kill frogs and others amphibians, whose populations are currently in steep decline across the United States. Numerous studies have shown that atrazine chemically castrates and feminizes male frogs at concentrations lower than the level allowed in drinking water by the EPA.

“When the amount of atrazine allowed in our drinking water is high enough to turn a male tadpole into a female frog, then our regulatory system has failed us,” said Donley. “We’ve reached a point with atrazine where more scientific analysis is just unnecessary — atrazine needs to be banned now.”

The latest findings come as the EPA is in the process of “registration review” of atrazine, a process designed to determine whether the chemical can safely be used in light of new scientific study. The assessment will inform EPA’s decision on whether to allow atrazine to be used for the next 15 years. The last time the agency fully analyzed the threats posed by atrazine was in 2003; no new registration decision has been made so far.

Atrazine, the second most commonly used herbicide in the United States, is used to control weeds in the corn blanketing much of the Midwest. And according to a new Environmental Protection Agency preliminary risk assessment, it may be doing serious harm to fish, animals, and amphibians, even at extremely low exposure levels. What's it doing to us?

http://www.alternet.org/environment/deadly-pesticide-atrazine-harming-most-animal-and-plant-species-says-epa-new-report

The amount of the herbicide atrazine that’s released into the environment in the United States is likely harming most species of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, according to a risk assessment released Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency. Atrazine is also well known as a hormone disruptor that has been linked to birth defects and cancer in humans, and contamination of ground-, surface- and drinking-water supplies. About 70 million pounds of atrazine are used in the United States each year.

The latest findings come as the EPA is in the process of “registration review” of atrazine, a process designed to determine whether the chemical can safely be used in light of new scientific study. The assessment will inform EPA’s decision on whether to allow atrazine to be used for the next 15 years. The last time the agency fully analyzed the threats posed by atrazine was in 2003; no new registration decision has been made so far....

prolly 2x

Published on Science 2.0 (http://www.science20.com)

Home > Social Sciences > Science Education & Policy > Science 2.0 > Atrazine And The Forever War On Science

Atrazine And The Forever War On Science

ByHank Campbell

Created May 7 2014

I'll tell you up front, I am not a big fan of chemicals.

It's not that I have chemophobia, or any science-phobia, I instead have that special sort of elitism that is available to people who have just been lucky enough to not need chemicals. I don't even like to take aspirin and I have that luxury because I haven't needed to take any drugs for a recurring condition, so it's really easy for me to embrace such naturalistic posturing. When it comes to food, if I had my way, nothing my family eats would be grown, processed, killed, cleaned or cooked by any hands but mine.

Like most of you, I can feel that way because I was lucky enough to be born in one of the most agriculturally rich places on Earth. Yet I know the rest of the world is not so lucky. For the rest of the world, there is one great equalizer: science. Science can make things grow where they otherwise might not, science can prevent pests and weeds from ravaging yields on small farms.

That's a good thing, and yet most people who benefit from it know little about it. And what they do know is scary.

Hank Campbell

Is there a war on science? Of course, there always has been.

[Shout out to Joe Haldeman. for pix]

Where I live in Sacramento, one of the world’s most agriculturally knowledgeable cities and the capital of America's largest food-producing state, if I ask most people to name a pesticide, they can only name one -DDT. They don't know why they can name it, they can't remember Rachel Carson or "Silent Spring", they just know it must be bad because they have heard of it.

That the only pesticide people know of hasn't been used here in over 40 years is a testament to the safety of modern science. In a vast, complicated narrative about science and our culture, where people assume if they have heard of a chemical, it must be bad, few people can name the two most popular herbicides that increase agriculture yields dramatically.

Those two are glyphosate and atrazine. Glyphosate (e.g. Roundup – Monsanto) has been covered extensively on Science 2.0 and while environmentalists don’t like it - they don’t like any chemicals - atrazine is where the real cultural action is.

There’s a stealth war going on over atrazine and, occasionally, as happened earlier this year, it breaks into open war and makes some mainstream news.

Unlike most science stories, this one didn’t involve any science – it instead invoked a world of threats, sexual harassment, lawsuits...and rapper Tupac Shakur.

*****

A few months ago, a journalist in The New Yorker named Rachel Avivwrote an article about a reproductive biologist who is convinced that atrazine, one of the most successful herbicides in history, is bad for us. It was good timing, because atrazine is undergoing a registration review with the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA had also convened a special science panel on it in 2009 after finally completing its last registration review (done every 15 years) in 2006.

Why does the EPA keep studying it? The easy answer is that is what the EPA does. The real answer is a lot more complicated.

The story begins with a 2002 journal paper that seemed to show atrazine had adverse effects on the laryngeal muscles of frogs – they were not developing properly and that impacts androgen and sexual reproduction. No calling, no canoodling – a real disaster for an indicator species like frogs.

It’s unclear today what was really happening with those frogs. No one knows except the researcher who made the claim, Professor Tyrone Hayes of Berkeley. He refuses to share his data with anyone.

Still, even without having any data, the EPA felt like it was a valid hypothesis. So-called endocrine disruptors have really diverse chemical structures and that can make it difficult to predict biological effects, but science knows a lot about amphibian biology by now, which makes frogs a good candidate to do that kind of risk assessment. And frogs are important.

Syngenta agreed. That’s right, the company behind atrazine said it made sense to determine once and for all if their product was harmful to the environment.

*****

Fast forward to February of 2014 and that article in The New Yorker. The piece by Rachel Aviv was not about science or even health, it was more about what we in science media call The Myth Of The Oppressed Underdog - that journalistic narrative where some maverick beacon of truth is trying to fight an entrenched constituent, be it a company or science dogma. At the time, I was uninterested, for the same reasons I am not interested when some underdog claims in a media article that a diet plan can prevent Alzheimer's or that cold fusion is being bought by Big Oil and stuck in a warehouse to protect profits. It was an advocacy piece about a biologist trying to convince the world of something and she did a fine job. I recognize that modern journalism is often about telling a story rather than getting to the bottom of one.

But I also recognize that journalistic advocacy is why a giant chunk of America no longer trusts scientists; in 2014, you can figure out the voting record of people by asking if they don't trust chemists or climatologists.

This story predictably took hold with the political demographic that dislikes chemicals and agriculture and corporations. Suddenly Hayes was on NPR and Democracy Now and being quoted in various other outlets. People like to believe in vast corporate conspiracies and media outlets need a steady stream of content for their audience and so no one 'asked the awkward questions' of Professor Hayes about the claims of racism and threats and dirty tricks by Syngenta that he lobbed during his soliloquies.

But then Hayes said he had the science to back his beliefs about how atrazine was harmful to frogs. I actually thought that had been settled for years and so it got me willing to ask the awkward questions. You should too, because unlike claims about frogs being feminized and data no one is allowed to see, the EPA is on record saying the issue has been settled, and the data is public.

Please get to the point. On a Terrorized Scale of 9 to 10, how scared

do media accounts want us to be? Image link:jessandeeonline

Journalists like to write about individuals rather than issues because writing about individuals is easy; just interview them and create a timeline and pick your hero and cash the check. Issues are much harder because they require research.

It turns out that if the issue is atrazine and public health, you can feel pretty safe.

*****

Atrazine is used to kill weeds, mostly in corn fields. Syngenta, its primary manufacturer, is big -really big, $14 billion - yet not so big that they can control where they show up in Google. If you search for atrazine, rather than get the actual atrazine site, the first entry is for Wikipedia and the very first citation in their entry is for that recent New Yorker article (as of April, 2014 anyway). Atrazine has been around since 1958 but the first citation in Wikipediais a New Yorker article from February of 2014? More strangely, that same article is cited three times before you even get to the table of contents.

That a piece with no science is the very first citation for a product pushing 60 years old tells you one important thing -- there may be no health issue, but there is certainly a public relations one.

Since the Wikipedia entry had clearly been hijacked by people promoting that New Yorker article and not science, I then went to Source Watch and other places that claim to find secrets - still no science but they assure us that Syngenta is not a nice company. I had saved the Environmental Protection Agency for last because I knew what I would find. They must really hate atrazine, I thought, they hate everything. This is the vilified government agency that had to be ordered by a Federal court to not blame fracking for environmental issues without doing a study, they declared water a pollutant when too much of it annoyed canoers, and they recently had to defend themselves against the charge that they do 'secret science' and don't disclose the methodology or studies related to greenhouse gas emissions.

If they blame first and prove later when it comes to the environment, the EPA must have really hammered this atrazine stuff – they spent years studying it, they had to have found something.

Well, they didn’t. Rather than a caricature of science like in the examples I listed above, I instead learned about one of the most rigorous environmental studies ever done. And it completely exonerated atrazine.

Why didn’t the atrazine Wikipedia entry talk about that? It did, but only writing that the EPA study has "been criticized". What was the citation for that? The New Yorker article. And that old Bogeyman"industry-funded" was invoked about it - the source for that? Also The New Yorker article.

Clearly, The New Yorker is far better at controlling information about atrazine than Syngenta is.

Conspiracy stories about funding and secret deals mobilize activists but they are a head-scratcher for actual scientists. Scientists know something Wikipedia editors and advocacy journalists do not; studies are "industry-funded" because that is a legal requirement.

All safety studies are industry-funded because if a company has to pay for studies, which can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, they won’t keep developing a product they are not convinced is safe and effective. The EPA and the FDA and everyone else is right for requiring industry-funded studies because most people agree that taxpayers should not have to pay to find out if a product is safe or not.If a company wants to sell something, they should prove it is safe.

In the case of atrazine, if you like irony you will like that the EPA told Syngenta they had to pay to try and prove their own product was harmful. The EPA was going to monitor the work and EPA got to pick the parameters and the methodology. The study was going to be duplicated and the results were going to be part of the public record, no matter how things turned out. How many journal articles that have a peer review stamp can say that?

In asking for the study, the EPA not only settled a safety issue, they pushed back the frontiers of science, because they asked for something that had never been done and no contract lab was capable of doing.

The Kloas Study

Not all studies are created equal. The EPA knows that some researchers quietly do boring, methodological, comprehensive and therefore outstanding work while others are just chasing the next paycheck or media appearance. Scientists are no different than people in any job that way.

So when trying to tackle the issue of whether or not atrazine was leading to this ‘feminization’ of male frogs, they outlined what a good study would be. Then they got all of the relevant studies available and weighted them according to those best practices.

19 studies were included in their examination of the frog feminizing hypothesis. Two were by Professor Tyrone Hayes. Of the 19 studies, only one matched EPA criteria for their highest confidence. That was no surprise, it had been created using their parameters, they did the quality assurance, they had verified the results and the results had been replicated.

And Syngenta even helped create that methodology. Not only does that debunk conspiracy tales about industry-funded research, it shows that industry-funded studies should help you sleep a lot better at night.

I was able to get an introduction to Dr. Tim Pastoor, a toxicologist by training and Principal Scientist at Syngenta, because I wanted to talk about atrazine and its effects on frogs and mammals and systems biology in general. Obviously, since this was after the New Yorker article and after some increasingly bizarre allegations against Pastoor by Professor Hayes, going the normal route through a corporate communications group would have taken forever.

I expected to reach a scientist under siege. Because of the strange claims by Hayes and the potentially unhinged behavior of a tiny segment of the environmental community that will believe anything about scientists, Pastoor now has a security detail that monitors his house. He also had to be wondering if I was a writing a me-too article similar to the piece in The New Yorker or, if you are knowledgeable about environmental books, maybe “A Plague Of Frogs II – Starring Atrazine”, but when we finally spoke he didn’t act like a scientist under siege at all, I got frank answers and transparency about serious science issues. A writer who prides himself on asking the awkward questions of scientists found someone who didn't regard any question as awkward.

Like most of you, I am not an expert in reproductive biology, much less in amphibians and chemicals, but I read the white paper that was the final product of the EPA analysis on the question of whether frogs were being damaged by atrazine. The EPA distilled a lot of data, much like the UN IPCC does with its climate reports. Like the IPCC product, it has to be manageable for everyone from scientists to staffers in Congress, so the EPA doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of the reader but they assume a lack of vocabulary and keep jargon to a minimum. Still, it is the length of a book and it’s about a narrow, complex field. That’s not easy going.

But the big answer to the big question is given out early and then repeated over and over. I told Pastoor that by page 114, I finally really noticed something that upon re-reading I found I had seen numerous times starting on page 6; the EPA didn't find any problems. Atrazine is actually kind of boring scientifically. Is that why the science gets so little traction in atrazine stories? I asked.

"I think we get distracted by claims there is a science issue with atrazine and there's just not. It's a political story, and it's a litigation story, and it's a self-aggrandizement story. But the actual science is boring because there's nothing going on," Pastoor replied.

But, I said, I thought the EPA had a valid hypothesis about frog gonads in 2002.

To my surprise, he agreed. Prior to that, Syngenta had created what they considered a real blue-ribbon panel of up-and-coming researchers and Dr. Tyrone Hayes, the subject of the New Yorker piece, was an early member, and when he found that laryngeal muscles in frogs were not enlarged like in a 'true' male, they were all intrigued.

"The panel wanted to reproduce it because it was provocative," Pastoor said, but Hayes did not want to reproduce it. The results of some of the work did not make sense, and Hayes resisted the idea of doing a duplicate study or answering questions about his use of data, so Syngenta was for it when the EPA said they wanted to tackle the issue, except with more rigorous and transparent methodology. By then, Hayes had also said he found an intersex/transgender effect, at low doses of atrazine, but that had no laryngeal effect. Things clearly did not add up.

“The larynx is a very lobular structure,” Pastoor said, “so it’s kind of like a big, bulky piece of spaghetti. You can imagine that, depending on where you cut through that, you would get different thicknesses, and that was one of the things that the panel” (meaning the other scientists on the panel, with Hayes) “pointed out; you have to have better control. It was just good histological practice.”

The EPA said they wanted a study to settle the matter, in a way that lacked the loose structure of private efforts – and that is a key point that critics of industry-funded studies miss. It is easy to get published in a journal and if the journal doesn't require that you include your raw data, as most don't, it is rarely noted. A university study is not required to use rigorous methodology and most academic studies require no expertise in statistics. We have all seen plenty of published papers that were clearly fishing expeditions with lots of cut corners to make for a nice retrospective conclusion about a hypothesis we never know that anyone had in advance.

EPA career scientists are not having that – and you can’t out-wait them either. Long after company employees and lobbyists have come and gone and EPA bureaucrats at the top have been replaced by new bureaucrats, career scientists at EPA will still be there asking for data if you ever want your product registered. An “industry-funded” study for the EPA is held to a standard that literally no paper for a journal is held, because they can make companies do it.

The EPA wanted a study with a sufficient number of animals, a positive control, orders of magnitude dosing and clean analytical standards. And they wanted Syngenta to pay for it.

"We had an option to do or not do that study," Pastoor said, "and you can imagine what a throw of the dice that was going to be. What if we found effects, particularly at low dose levels? One of the things I admire about this company is that, after not a whole lot of debate, we said 'yeah, we've got to do that study' even though it could result in absolutely cutting the legs off of atrazine. We needed to know and EPA was asking for it, so we did it."

Prof. Dr. Werner Kloas is a Distinguished Professor for Endocrinology at Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2002 he had written a paper for International Review of Cytology outlining how to use amphibians in studies of endocrine disruption. He was publicly on record as being a fan of the precautionary principle and saying that a chemical should be banned if there is evidence that it is unsafe. He is so thorough his C.V. includes where he went to elementary school.

In sum, he was the perfect person to spearhead the study the EPA wanted.

Neither Syngenta nor the EPA knew what would happen when two independent labs in two countries using the same methodology and 3,200 frogs set out to see what impact atrazine had on amphibian reproductive health.

We know now. There’s no evidence of harm.

How we are taught to think of science. Credit: Walking Dead/AMC

That had to be something of a letdown for critics, because the science was settled. Except it wasn't a letdown at all – they just pretended it never happened.

*****

The Kloas study is the definitive work on atrazine and frogs. Oddly, Professor Hayes dismissed it, and the profile of Hayes in The New Yorker did not delve into its merits either. It was disqualified as “industy-funded”, as if the EPA is controlled by Syngenta.

Let’s think about that: The EPA convened a Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) in 2003. They finally concluded a lengthy re-registration of atrazine in 2006. The EPA White Paper about the frog reproduction hypothesis was produced in 2007. In 2009 they convened another Scientific Advisory Panel. Then in 2013 they opened registration review again on its normal schedule, even though the previous one was only concluded 7 years ago. Clearly the EPA is not favoring Syngenta and if Syngenta is controlling them, they are doing a terrible job at it.

Regardless, Professor Hayes does not think much of the EPA and the EPA does not think much of the work of Professor Hayes either. Though they looked at two of his papers, they were not considered rigorous enough to meet their standards.

“Dr. Hayes claims not only that his laboratory has repeated the findings many times in experiments with thousands of frogs, but that other scientists have also replicated his results. EPA, however, has never seen either the results from any independent investigator published in peer-reviewed scientific journals or the raw data from Dr. Hayes' additional experiments,” EPA deputy director Anne Lindsay testified in 2005.

In 2010, an EPA division director responded to a request from an Illinois politician who was spurred to concern by the claims of Hayes. Donald Brady outlined how analyses of studies were done – by whole committees of interdisciplinary teams doing multiple reviews. He told Illinois State Representative Dave Winters that the EPA couldn’t use the Hayes studies because there was no data and so they could not account for sample sizes and methodology. In other words, they weren’t valid studies.

What about other endocrinologists? While the Kloas study was a scientifically agnostic, prospective study, other labs have tried to reproduce the Hayes findings specifically. The Okazaki Institute for Integrative Bioscience couldn’t get any hermaphroditic frogs using atrazine - and they were really trying.

Since no one can replicate the findings of Hayes, why do they continue to have such prominence in press accounts? One easy answer is that anything critical of corporations and chemicals is going to draw eyeballs to the pages of publications, and everyone from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to The New Yorker is aware of that. An editor and a journalist know a boring science story isn’t exciting anyone but if someone is willing to go on record claiming harassment and a corporate conspiracy, that will get some social media buzz.

It's also symptomatic of something that should terrify scientists and the public – atrazine is part of an ongoing broader effort to have science done by political review, similar to genetically modified food, vaccines and climate change.

In 2009, Senator Barbara Boxer(D-CA) insisted that the EPA do another review in a private meeting with top-level EPA staff, right after a press release by National Resources Defense Council said atrazine in water was harmful.

No scientists were included in the discussion.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course, it's been happening for as long as governments have been funding research. This "Forever War on Science" has been occurring for so long that no one even recognizes it is a war any more. Modern journalists, even some scientists and certainly the public think that's just the way it is - science is to be chosen a la carte and if you don't like the results, find someone saying something else and just choose different facts. Half of the public can comfortably be dismissed as anti-science if they disagree with anything the other half accepts.

What about the sexual harassment, the racism and secret messages using rap lyrics I promised? What started out as a simple question drawn from a claim I saw in an interview - is atrazine harmful? - ended up being 15,000 words on the science of pesticides, kinetics, dynamics, a talk about frog sex with some of the world's foremost experts on frog sex, and the anti-science culture that effects the left and the right, and Europeans and Americans alike, so I am breaking it up into manageable chunks but by the end of it we'll all have a better grasp of chemistry, the environment and, yes, Tupac Shakur.

Forever War On Science graphic: A public domain picture of a fern and a guy from Castle Wolfenstein. Credit: Hank Campbell

Science Education & Policy

ION Publications LLC

Source URL: http://www.science20.com/science_20/atrazine_and_the_forever_war_on_science-135693

omg 2012 http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:Atrazine_Exposed

The Center for Media and Democracy has analyzed the emails, invoices, and other PR documents unsealed by the court. Read more by clicking the articles below published in CMD's PRWatch: Syngenta PR’s Weed-Killer Spin Machine: Investigating the Press and Shaping the "News" about Atrazine, by Beau Hodai and Lisa Graves

Syngenta's Paid Third Party Pundits Spin the "News" on Atrazine, by Sara Jerving

Atrazine: A "Molecular Bull in a China Shop", by Rebekah Wilce

Syngenta Celebrates Earth Day by Ladling on the Pesticides, by Rebekah Wilce Beyond Pesticides,

"Common Herbicide May Increase Risk of Rare Disorder in Infants," (October 2, 2012).Clare Howard, "EPA Oversight: Weighing the Parts, Ignoring the Whole," 100 Reporters (Feb. 15, 2012).Clare Howard, "Pitchfork Rebels: Organic Farmers Take on Big Ag," 100 Reporters (Feb. 15, 2012).Clare Howard, "Downwind: The Second-Hand Smoke of Big Agriculture," 100 Reporters (Feb. 14, 2012).Clare Howard, "Coming Clean: Water Companies Call Industry to Account," 100 Reporters (Feb. 14, 2012).

Rachael Moeller Gorman, "Glass half empty: Is your tap water safe?," MSNBC and Good Housekeeping (Feb. 14, 2012).Penelope Jasessar Chaffer, "Tyrone Hayes + Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: The toxic baby?," TED, Ideas Worth Sharing (Feb. 14, 2012) (video).John Sundquist, "Let’s stop aerial spraying of poison on forestland Guest viewpoint ," Register Guard (Feb. 10, 2012) (op-ed).Paul Fattig, "Pesticide rallies intended to spread concerns," Mail Tribune (Feb. 9, 2012).Scholars & Rogues, "Steve Milloy is still a fact fighter for hire," ScholarsandRogues.com (Feb. 9, 2012).Jeff Mapes, "Behind the PR curtain: Oregon firm played part in effort to counter attacks on herbicide," The Oregonian (Feb. 8, 2012).Steve Myers, "Firm investigated HuffPost reporter’s motivations for critical stories," Poynter (Feb. 7, 2012).

Other: Jon Entine, "Over-Regulation Fever at the White House," Forbes (Feb. 9, 2012) (Entine is one of the people mentioned in the unsealed documents as a potential "third party" spokesperson for atrazine, as noted in the PRWatch article available here.)

Rich Keller, "Smear campaign against atrazine and Syngenta," Ag Professional (op-ed) (This is a trade magazine that promotes information from Syngenta press releases; this online magazine includes a promo ad that says, "Ag Professional, sponsored by Syngenta.")

links: The Center for Media and Democracy has analyzed the emails, invoices, and other PR documents unsealed by the court. Read more by clicking the articles below published in CMD's PRWatch: