RoundUp and Pregnancy – Vital Information You Should Know

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Sometimes, the most serious fighting doesn’t take place on battlefields, but in crop fields. Think of pesticides as guns, and the crops that have been sprayed as firing back by leeching those herbicides and pesticides back into ground water.

It’s almost as if we are being involved in this silent gun battle through our foods and our water. Unfortunately, it’s hitting pregnant women hardest of all. Studies done recently in Bangladesh show that pesticides are being taken into the blood streams of humans, causing lead poisoning in women who are pregnant, which can harm the developing brains of as of yet unborn children.

The chemical at the heart of this controversy is the world’s most popular herbicide, RoundUp. It’s increasingly coming under more intense scrutiny after the recent release of a new report that is calling for a more tightly regulated control of its use.

Those in charge of regulating the use of RoundUp have routinely overlooked, or just plain ignored, critics charges that glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, is a serious threat to the health and well-being of humans. Find out 5 reasons why RoundUp should be banned forever.

Earth Open Source released their results of a comprehensive review of all the existing data regarding this substance and they are suggesting the regulators in Europe have known for years, perhaps for decades, that glyphosate can cause birth defects in the embryos of lab animals.

Earth Open Source is a non-profit organization that was founded in 2009. It’s incorporated in the UK but is international in its scope of coverage. Earth Open Source is partners with at least a half a dozen international scientist and researchers. They came to this conclusion from studies that have been performed in many parts of the world including Brazil, France, Argentina, and the US.

This report isn’t new, however, it simply adds to the growing number of reports about the dangers of glyphosate. This same study states that as of 1993, Monsanto, as well as the entire herbicide industry, knew that abnormalities, such as dilation of the heart, was occurring in rabbits exposed to low and medium sized doses of RoundUp. It also states that since at least 2002, the European Commission knew that glyphosate caused developmental malformations in tests done with lab animals. Despite knowing this, the European Union approved its use in Europe for the next 10 years. Read more about top 10 companies that kill the world with their pesticides.

Despite the fact that a half a dozen studies showed that RoundUp caused fetal malformation in lab animals, and a completely independent study done in 2007 showed that glyphosate encourages adverse reproductive effects in the male offspring of rats, the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, told the European Commission that there was no evidence to prove that RoundUp caused birth defects.

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On top of this, a study done in Sri Lanka showed that RoundUp, which is a broad-spectrum herbicide that is used to target only weeds, can act as a carrier for heavy metals such as arsenic and lead. RoundUp makes a chemical bond with these toxic heavy metals and provides a means for them to enter the human body. Once heavy metals are introduced in the blood stream, they circulate throughout the entire body and can damage our kidneys, brains, and every other vital organ in the body.

Similar results are being reported in studies done in Bangladesh. The use of these pesticides and herbicides is being linked to higher levels of lead in the blood of pregnant women that live in rural areas where crops are being sprayed. Stanford University joined with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research center in Bangladesh to try to find out why so many women in their country have such high levels of lead in their bodies. With nearly half of the pregnant women who were tested had high levels of lead in their bloodstream it wasn’t difficult to find out why. This influx of increased lead was due to the use of pesticides and herbicides that were being used in the women’s agricultural region.

Women who had low levels of lead were eating and drinking from areas that had little or no chemicals sprayed on the crops in the surrounding areas. Women with high levels of lead ate the food that was sprayed with chemicals, lived near these areas, ate more canned foods as well as rice that was husked from machines, instead of by hand.

This suggests that herbicides like RoundUp act as a sort of catalyst, which causes food crops like rice to absorb more lead. Since RoundUp interrupts natural pathways and growth processes in crops, are they now making them vulnerable to absorbing more toxins and heavy metals? Studies suggest that this is the case.

Lead is a serious subject matter. It’s toxic to humans no matter where it ends up, in the kidneys, brain, liver, heart or brain. It destroys the central nervous system in children that are forming in their mother’s womb, causing learning disorders and behavior problems.

One study done in France in 2005 found that glyphosate cause the death of human placental cells, and another study performed in 2009 found that this herbicide caused total cell death in human umbilical, placenta cells, and embryonic cells in 24 hours, but follow up studies have not been conducted. There is a limit on what’s appropriate when speaking of testing poisons on humans. However, when one looks at the line of converging evidence, it all points to a serious problem. There is a consistent line of reproductive problems with studies done on animals.

Monsanto has gotten a lot of heat over the years for its soft-pedaling of RoundUp. New York State sued Monsanto for describing RoundUp in their advertising as “environmentally friendly”, and “as safe as table salt”. Although Monsanto would not agree to any wrong doing or any misstatements, they did stop using those terms and paid the state of New York a quarter of a million dollars to drop the lawsuit.

Regulators in the United States are aware of the concerns regarding RoundUp. The EPA, which is required by law to reassess the safety of all pesticides and herbicides every 15 years, is currently examining RoundUp. The agency has a department called Pesticide Program and it is in charge of the next review, which will be announced in 2015 as to whether or not this herbicide can be sold or if it needs to meet tighter restrictions on its use.

Unfortunately, many of the agri-giants, such as Monsanto and Dow, are part of the 19 member task force, and will generate much of the data the EPA will look at. However, the EPA insists that this task force is only one of several third party sources that they will rely on for its use in the review of this product.

Having Big-Agri provide the evidence…..isn’t that a bit like letting the fox watch the henhouse?

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