Officials within EPA worked to slow a safety review of glyphosate, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, in an apparent response to emails from Monsanto, which makes the chemical, said HuffPost. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of HHS, said in early 2015 that it planned to publish a toxicological review of glyphosate before winter of that year, but the review has yet to appear.
Most of the he communications between EPA and Monsanto were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, said the HuffPost article, written by Carey Gillam, author of a 2017 book about glyphosate and research director of the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know. The EPA did not respond to a request for comment about its dealings with the HHS agency or its emails with Monsanto.
Jim Jones, who was an assistant EPA administrator in charge of pesticides in 2015, said his interest in the matter was to prevent duplication of effort. The EPA was conducting its own safety review of glyphosate at the time. An EPA advisory committee eventually decided in 2016 that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” similar to the findings of European and Canadian reviews. In March 2015, the UN International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic.
“Rather than encourage and assist the toxicology review of glyphosate, Monsanto and EPA officials repeatedly complained to ATSDR and HHS that such a review was unnecessarily ‘duplicative’ and should take a back seat to an EPA review also underway,” said HuffPost. The EPA says it intends to release a draft risk assessment of glyphosate later this year.