According to the bibliometric analysis conducted by the Future Generations Association, 99% of pesticide toxicity studies are considered irrelevant or not reliable by the European Preliminary Report.
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Can
be scientific expertise if science is not there? It is the thorny question asked by the Future Generations association on the European preliminary expertise on glyphosate, which must allow the re-authorization in Europe of controversial herbicide, at the end of 2022. In a public analysis Tuesday, November 16, The anti-pesticide association estimates and for the first time the unincorporated part of the overwhelming majority of recent university studies by the European Preliminary Report (RAR, for “Renewal Assessment Report”), prepared by regulatory agencies Dutch, Hungarian, French and Swedish.
According to the bibliometric analysis conducted by the association, only 3% of the 7,188 studies published in international scientific journals on glyphosate over the last ten years have indeed been judged “relevant” and “may be useful for the evaluation “of the substance. Of these, only a small fraction – 0.4% of the set – are judged “reliable”. In total, this is more than 99% of the learned literature produced over the last decade on toxicity, ecotoxicity or endocrine disturbance properties (ability to interfere with the hormonal system) of the highest synthesis pesticide used in the world that is tried irrelevant or not reliable by the RAR.
On the other hand, notes the association, the studies conducted by the manufacturers benefit from greater massiveness and end up found the essence of European expertise. However, the association is the responsibility of the “major defects” in most of these regulatory tests, which have been considered reliable by European evaluators.
The report of the association illuminates a controversy that has lasted for more than five years. In March 2015, the International Cancer Research Center (IARC), the main classification authority of carcinogenic agents, classified glyphosate as “probable carcinogen for man”. A diametrically opposite position to that of European and American regulatory agencies: considered non-carcinogenic, glyphosate has been re-authorized in 2017, for five years, in the territory of the European Union.
Divergence of view
Four years later, the results of the new European expertise are identical. According to the conclusions of the RAR, communicated in June, glyphosate would not be carcinogenic or mutagenic, neither reprotoxic, nor endocrine disruptive. At the same time, the collective expertise of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) argued a different opinion, in particular concluding an “average presumption” of a link between occupational exposure to glyphosate and occurred. A non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a type of cancer of the lymphatic system.
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