After a four-day meeting, members of a Scientific Advisory Panel were divided over the EPA’s conclusion, issued in a September 2016 white paper, that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” Agri-Pulse reported.
“Panel members who supported EPA said the evidence from the epidemiological and animal studies was simply not strong enough to support anything else,” said Agri-Pulse. But other members of the panel said that the evidence was “suggestive” that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, has potential to cause cancer.
Lianne Shepard, the assistant chair in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington, said that, taken together, epidemiological studies of whether glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma were enough to tilt the scale in favor of a “suggestive” finding, even if individually the studies may not contain strong evidence of a connection. “Clearly, it’s suggestive to me, and it’s the most appropriate public-health conclusion to reach,” she said.
At Huffington Post, US Right to Know’s Carey Gillam wrote : “The EPA’s determination is crucial on many fronts – Monsanto is currently defending itself against more than three dozen lawsuits claiming glyphosate-based Roundup gave people non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a type of blood cancer; both the EPA and the European Union are assessing re-registrations of glyphosate to determine if limits should be placed on the chemical; and Monsanto is attempting a $66 billion merger with German-based Bayer.”
Gillam wrote that from the outset , concerns were raised by some of the experts about the quality of the EPA’s analysis. “Some scientists were concerned that the EPA was violating its own guidelines in discounting data from various studies that show positive associations between glyphosate and cancer. Several of the (panel) members questioned why the EPA excluded some data that showed statistical significance, and wrote off some of the positive findings to mere chance.”
This is the latest round in an ongoing debate over the possible link between glyphosate and cancer that began in March 2015, when the WHO’s cancer agency declared that glyphosate probably causes cancer in humans.