Almost five years after the International Center for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen”, this is a new piece which adds to the debate on the dangers of the controversial herbicide. In its last edition of February, the review Environmental Health publishes a reanalysis of the thirteen carcinogenicity studies available on rodents. Conducted by toxicologist Christopher Portier, former director of the American National Toxicology Program (NTP) and now an associate professor at the University of Maastricht (Netherlands), this study indicates that the controversial herbicide is capable of causing various cancers on exposed animals.
If this conclusion is significant, it is that these same tests – the majority of which were carried out by the manufacturers themselves – served as a basis for the opinions of regulatory authorities, in particular European and American. However, they unanimously considered, conversely, that glyphosate has no carcinogenic potential.
Confidential, regulatory tests cannot generally be consulted by the scientific community, their examination being reserved for experts from agencies such as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) or the United States Environmental Protection Agency ( LFS).
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In 2017, MEPs obtained from EFSA Director General Bernhard Url a copy of the data from these studies, but agreed not to make it public. They had shared this information with Mr. Portier. Subject to the same confidentiality, the American toxicologist – who participated in trials across the Atlantic against Monsanto, as an expert witness with the plaintiffs -, could not explain his analysis in detail.
It was only after a judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), rendered in March 2019 and theoretically allowing anyone to request the same data from the authorities that hold it, that Mr. Portier was able to submit his reanalysis for publication in scholarly literature.
His conclusion is unvarnished. “If the regulatory authorities have carried out a full analysis of all the available evidence from the thirteen animal carcinogenicity studies, as has been done here, writes the American toxicologist, it is difficult to understand how they came to a conclusion other than the ability of glyphosate to cause cancer in laboratory animals. ”
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